Saving The Cats Of Springfield
A plan for reversing postindustrial gangrene
The latest poster child for American postindustrial decline is Springfield, Ohio, a Midwestern town of 50,000 people which had 20,000 Haitians dropped into it by the current administration. The Haitians proceeded to act like Haitians, leading to people complaining about their cats and park waterfowl getting scarfed, suddenly dangerous public schools and widespread car accidents caused by the Haitians driving their unregistered and uninsured cars in traditional Haitian fashion. Thanks to election year meme magic, the story became national news, rebroadcast by Trump. The American left immediately launched into their usual “it’s not happening, and it’s good that it is” damage control bit.
(from https://x.com/FearghasKelly/status/1833826081754808363)
Since much of the West is either like Springfield or on the way there, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts:
How did Springfield get here?
Josiah (a wignat-adjacent former Marine junior officer) is not speaking from coastal elite contempt for flyover country. The scene he describes is completely familiar to me from my youth; many of the American towns I visited as a young man looked similar to his description, or at least decayed enough that this was obviously in the cards. The destruction of heartland American infrastructure was the inevitable result of the destruction of heartland American human capital. The culprit behind the later is alienation from a connection with God and the loss of a hierarchical view of the universe and man’s place in it.
From this:
To this:
In a world where anything can mean anything and nothing really means anything, where there is no harmony or divine order, no God, and we are all just walking, talking pieces of meat, everyone is ultimately out for themselves. The common denominator is Epicureanism: “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” “Screw you, I got mine.”
On a governance level, this results in a metastasizing bureaucratic middle layer working with NGOs, local government and business interests, spreading to all aspects of human affairs, driven by short term profit and influence maximization, and completely amoral. On a personal level, it results in people freed from moral constraints, pursuing their animalistic interests: sex, substance abuse, gluttony, conspicuous consumption, chimp status games. The result is the disintegration of all organic institutions, right down to the nuclear family, and ultimately feral humans lurching around dystopian hellscapes, smartphone in hand (see above).
That’s how Springfield and a million other Western towns have been hollowed out. The few kids the native population manages to have are raised by the educational institutions which are holding pens managed by civil servants holding out for their 30 year pension, and by their screens selling vicarious hedonism. Corn syrup-flavored bread and smartphone circuses. Any local manufacturing and farming businesses which survived the post-NAFTA offshoring spiral are desperate for cheap labor. Local elites and NGOs are thirsty for government money. The stage is set for the
Attack of the Catwomen
The US federal government has made Haitians, along with many millions of other third worlders, eligible for Temporary Protected Status. This facilitates their mass importation. The government then started pumping money into a network of NGOs whose mission was to distribute migrants across America and deploy them into target areas. Local government officials and landlords then collect massive amounts federal money from renting properties to the migrants at inflated prices. Local businesses employ them on terms akin to indentured servitude. School districts are presumably enjoying access to increased funding for the masses of migrant students now on the rolls. Everyone in the migrant-industrial complex makes out like a bandit, at the cost of those who are not connected. Profits are privatized, costs are socialized.
In large part, the migrant-industrial complex is staffed by childless women, who get their moral kicks and vicariously satisfy their stulted maternal instincts by using the migrants as proxy children. Of course, sometimes one of your pets gets a little rowdy and eats one of your other pets, and it’s very tragic! But that’s certainly not going to prevent the sort of person who’d adopt a rescue pitbull from doing so.
Are Haitians really like that?
Not all of them. I grew up with some very nice Haitian neighbors, and worked with a great Haitian senior USMC NCO in Afghanistan. But do some Haitians eat cats? Some Haitians eat Haitians! It’s a tradition-Haiti gained its independence from the French in a series of race war massacres, in which cannibalism was not uncommon. 80 years later, according to Froude, it was routine. 30 years after that, it was still going on, according to the USMC. Eating city park ducks and the neighbor’s cat is passe by Haitian standards.
Dietary habits aside, Haiti is what the worst place in the Western hemisphere only because it is peopled by Haitians. Constant war and anarchy, voodoo, endemic rape and slavery are all parts of modern Haitian culture. It would be insane to imagine that as their planes crossed into American airspace, Haitians would magically transform into suburban Buckeyes fans.
Springfield’s long term prospects
The Haitians will not become engineers and scientists. They’ll work low-skilled jobs in manufacturing and agriculture, which will come at the expense of the local workers’ wages and will not result in a boom in these fields. In 10-20 years, many will be living off benefits and scams. Their children will be thugged out and selling drugs to the few kids the natives will have managed to have. In the meantime, the Hatians will have inflicted massive damage to their host society by third world behavior: destroying their subsidized housing, making public spaces uninhabitable by feral antisocial behavior, making the roads undriveable and insurance unaffordable by wrecking unregistered, uninsured cars, committing a wide array of crimes, from petty to major. The people who live in Springfield who aren’t already unproductive mobility scooter-riding dope fiends on SSI will abandon their now-worthless homes and flee, not even managing to have the 1.7 kids they would otherwise have squeezed out.
Even if the migrants were to return to Haiti tomorrow, Springfield and its thousands of sister towns would be doomed, for the reasons I detailed earlier. Their deaths would take longer and be more pleasant, but have the same result in the long term. Saving them requires unprecedented actions.
How to save Springfield
To give the people of Springfield a reason to live, to have and raise many children, to revitalize their society, you’d need to take drastic measures
rework the school curriculum to emphasize the Noahide Laws
focus heavily on building stuff using machine tools from age 10 onwards
exempt all new manufacturing and agriculture businesses from taxes for the first 5-10 years
allow parents to draw the equivalent of the school budget spent per child for homeschooling their kids: You have five kids and the Ohio school system spends $20k per kid? You've got $100k a year.
reward screen-free homes (no TVs, non-work computers, tablets, no phones for kids)
The birth rate would quadruple in a generation, and these kids would be productive and healthy. The minority of young Americans still interested in building a family and a productive life would migrate to these towns en masse. Perhaps they would serve as breeding grounds for a newly reinvigorated American culture.
Doing this would require a revolution, sidelining the entrenched cancer of the education mafia, the migrant-industrial Complex, and generally treating the existing state like the Dutch East India Company treated local potentates with bones in their noses. You'd need something like an executive order allowing the declaration of a community as failed and establishing a private protectorate through a tender, renewal conditional on meeting key performance indicators over 5, 10, 15, 20 years. These protectorates’ stocks would reflect the value of life in a paradaisical community, where one can raise a big, thriving family and run a productive, successful business without worrying about their superiors importing legions of orcs to eat their cat and kill Junior on his way to school (true story!)
Is this realistic?
Common sense and experience say, “no.” The American right wing represents American normies, and the normies response to being abused by their government has historically been passive acceptance. Whether it was having their kids marched to newly integrated schools at bayonet point by the 82nd Airborne, having abortion clinics open their doors in town for their daughters to kill their grandkids, or having their sons’ schools facilitate their entry into the eunuch pipeline, normies mostly responded by scratching their head, settling into the couch and turning on the football game. The exceptions over the last 50 years were easily marginalized because they placed themselves outside the law.
Still, it feels like a change might be in the air. Barbecuing Fluffy just might be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I want to believe.
Well I believe.. that the Enlightenment is dying with Biden and the Boomers.
Good. Riddance.
Stop being serious I’m still laughing on the vaudeville clip “In Springfield “