Trump isn’t even in office yet, and the coalition has just had its first big outbreak of class warfare on Twitter, between American nationalists and the Silicon Valley oligarch faction of the right. The former demanded a shutdown of the H1B visa program, which results in an endless stream of nepotistic, incompetent Indian indentured servant scabs flowing in to do all the 115-130 IQ STEM jobs poorly and cheaply (insert long litany of justified complaints about Indians in tech.) The latter responded by accusing Americans of being lazy and stupid, culminating in Elon delivering a marvelous diplomatic gem.
So, what have we learned?
A Sermon on the Virtue of Chastity, Delivered at the Blue Oyster
Trump’s inner coalition is very much Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Talented Ellis Island types-Russian Jews, Iraqis, Indians, Italians. The money guys are also immigrant-heavy: Musk, Thiel, Vivek. Talented, ambitious, declasse people. This is who Trump feels at home with. His grandpa was a German immigrant who ran a Klondike whorehouse, and his dad was an NYC slumlord. These guys are not Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York.
I’m sorry, it’s all very disappointing. If you’re a nativist, surely you’d like this administration, the American right’s last hope, to be heavily made up of WASPs, Boston Brahmin Mayflower types, perhaps. Unfortunately for you, those guys all see you the same way as His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed Bin Salman sees some Punjabi kebab merchant blathering about the Umma.
Perhaps you’d prefer a coalition of Rust Belt and Appalachian Andrew Jackson-type Scots-Irish. Unfortunately, Mee Maw and Cooter are not represented by anyone except for Vance (who’s married to an Ivy League-educated Indian lady, who seems very nice.)
An explicitly racialist/nativist pitch at Trump’s guys is about as likely to succeed as a plea for chastity at a San Francisco bathhouse. If you had to come up with a strategy to reduce or cancel the H1B program entirely, you’d probably try to build on a series of successes vs. low hanging fruit like expelling the millions of illegal immigrants who have poured into the US over the last few years, and then make a very non-racial, meritocratic pitch at carefully selected members of the administration-something along the lines of “we need to make sure we’re only bringing in the very best, and not driving down the wages of promising young Americans.” Having asshole demagogues making H1Bs a wedge issue before the new administration has even come into office would be a great attack from the incumbent power coalition, a brilliant Machiavellian false flag, which is why I doubt it’s an op; the Hunter laptop gang just isn’t that subtle or talented.
No, this looks like an own goal caused by the lack of a real nativist subcoalition. The nativists don’t have anything beyond a mob animated by funny memes and slogans on Twitter. This kind of coordination mechanism doesn’t really allow for things beyond emergent behaviors, so nativist strategy is basically an oxymoron-instead, you get these mass chimpouts, followed by sulking when they fail.
Strip mining brains
Why is it that the American Heartland hasn’t produced its own power block, complete with tech oligarchs, to defend the interests of its people? Paradoxically, for the same reason that the US is being flooded with H1Bs. One of the major purposes of compulsory mass education is to identify talented, motivated children as early as possible and to put them on the track to success; this means being pulled into the national metropolitan centers for elite education and career progression. This process has been taking place all over America for the last 120 years. It’s the way Marc Andreesen went from Iowa to Silicon Valley, for instance. And it’s exactly the way that the H1Bs get there.
This process, by the way, is a perfect example of why Curtis Yarvin’s model of the state as sovereign firm doesn’t work.*
On the face of it, it’s an excellent managerial process aimed at maximizing efficient utilization of human resources. Where can Marc Andreesen generate maximum shareholder value, in Silicon Valley or Cedar Falls, Iowa? Like, duh. Any national CEO failing to implement a system to rank the nation’s children and entice the brightest ones to move to the metropolis should instantly be fired for corporate malpractice.
In practice, this system is a recipe for disaster. Removing the best and brightest children from their communities over and over, over the span of generations, strip mines those communities’ future leaders and entrepreneurs, leaving those who couldn’t make it. That’s a major part of the reason that you don’t have a serious American Heartland power block-the seed corn has been eaten for generations. J.D. Vance’s book gives you a pretty good indication. I would obviously rather live surrounded by rednecks than coastal metropolitan office plankton-rednecks are far more trustworthy, useful and virtuous-but their society is unfortunately also a trainwreck.
But the system is not just a regional disaster. When you pull the smartest people from a population, their kids tend to regress to the mean. In their native communities, the midwit children of the local brain trust could seamlessly blend in and become functional members of society, perhaps given a leg up by their parents. In the synthetic coastal metropolitan communities made up of harvested brains, served by immigrant helots, there is no room for midwit kids; they are destined to either become druggie failsons or lifelong beneficiaries of nepotism, legacy admits clogging up the system. Neither is a recipe for social harmony.
What makes it worse is the antinatalist nature of modern Western society, which depresses birth rates both in the source communities and in the metropolitan ones, more so the latter. Your harvested smart kids become sterile, and your source population is hit with a double whammy-its smartest children disproportionately leave, taking their genetics with them, and the next generation of children is smaller.
The only solution to this is to find a new source population of talent to harvest. Hence, H1B visas. The fact that the subcontinental source population has very different standards of integrity, professionalism and competence exacerbates the problem, adding insult to injury.
It gets worse
America, and thus the civilized world, is run by managerialism. As much as possible, things must be run by formal, rote processes. Flowcharts. Reality and human nature being what they are, it is impossible to run anything by flowcharts, and therefore in practice everything runs on politics. The gap between the ideal and reality is filled by different kinds of bullshit and make-believe, as anyone who’s ever worked in a corporate or government environment can tell you. After a couple of generations of this, you get a hereditary managerial class which sees actually knowing how to do anything as beneath itself, Powerpoint Spartiates whose main-only-skills are politics and bullshit.
Brahmins can do politics and bullshit as well as anyone else, having had a couple of millennia to get good at it. Their specific flavor, however, is very cloying to the American taste.
And that’s how we got here.
“When his salary depends on his not understanding it”
So, the system is a shitshow, and could not be otherwise. The tech bro wing of the right wing coalition is entirely made up of guys sitting at the top of the food chain. Thiel, Vivek, Musk are Gigachads inhabiting a different universe from a normal Midwestern state university comp sci grad. From their perspective, the system works great. Their main incentive is to import cheap labor, good enough for whatever tasks need to be done, and get on with the business of making money. Revitalizing the American population and heartland simply isn’t on the list of priorities.
Musk specifically is aware that the population is collapsing, and of the associated social pathologies, which he describes in a very Fox News-watching Boomer way as the “Woke mind virus.” He’s not really one for systemically thinking about social engineering on any scale, as evidenced by his family life closely resembling that of the brook trout. In general, Musk’s philosophy is accelerationist, summarized as the idea that technological progress, done quickly enough, can outrun human and social decay. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So what’s your solution?
The last 250 years have been full of examples of wiseass Jewboys coming up with earnest, big brained solutions to goy problems. Historically, it’s worked out poorly for both sides.
If you were to press me (twist my arm! Twist it!) I would suggest looking at our Haredi communities as a blueprint. Have an educational system focused almost entirely on moral inculcation by means of the study of texts ranging from the seemingly simple to the complex, put businessmen in their place (their prestige determined in very large part by the value they bring to their community through various philanthropic efforts, as guided by religious authorities,) have a highly restrictive sexual morality (bragging about your sexual exploits or having a series of children out of wedlock would, in Haredi society, get you looked at like you were a smelly NYC subway Michael Jackson impersonator,) arrange early marriage for all members as much as possible, encourage having lots of kids as a value unto itself, resist compulsory public education, treat the larger government as an unpleasant and hostile reality to be dealt with, mitigated and exploited as far as possible. Maybe I’ll write more on this later.
One thing is for sure-Twitter chimpouts are good for clicks, but won’t get your problem fixed.
*By the way, the idea of maximizing human value sounds good until you start thinking about it in depth. Does value include the expected value of all of one’s descendants? How do you quantify value-in dollars, freely given by imaginary consumer units? Who had more value in a state like Sparta-the Helots, who produced all of its manufactured and agricultural goods, or the Spartiates, who produced its security but had Pashtun-like difficulties figuring out the mechanical details of producing baby Spartiates? What is the value of a Delta Force operator as compared to a Silicon Valley CEO or a Mormon patriarch? What’s the value of a professor specializing in subjects such as the study of obscure medieval politics as compared to a carpenter? If you thought estimating inflation involved a serious fudge factor, wait til you try to estimate the value of human resources.
This is a great article. Outstanding work.
A word on Jimmy Carter:
https://x.com/afshineemrani/status/1873500583656927583/photo/1