These highlights were saved with the Kindle version of Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation by Lauren Southern.
A dispossession has rendered us incapable of even acknowledging the existence of Western culture, let alone being proud of it, which has utterly degraded our status as heirs to that culture. Because of this degradation — this willful amnesia toward the West’s most awe-inspiring discoveries, its greatest achievements, its most transcendent principles, even its historical identity — people my age are groping in the dark for meaning, and finding it in increasingly insane, fanatical places.
In my case, I was being taught to believe that, first, I was special, unique, important, and great beyond words; second, that I was completely equal to everyone, which is to say average and mediocre.
I was taught that war, when conducted by communists, terrorists, and agitators, is peace. That freedom, when exercised by white cishet men, is slavery. And most horribly of all, that ignorance is strength.
Greatness is measured in hard-earned victories, not participation trophies.
Western ideals have shaped our cultures into some of the greatest, freest, most generous, most decent, most egalitarian, and most peaceful on Earth.
The rights guaranteed by Western ideals exist because our civilization was willing to shed blood in order to shut down its enemies, rather than provide safe spaces to savages.
Diversity is not a strength; it’s a weakness. Its legacy is not peace and love, but division and hate.
Millennials have been raised to hold hedonism above all. Whatever feels good goes. Freedoms and rights are things for legislators and judges to conjure out of thin air, not precious traditions forged in the crucible of history.
Dismissing the guidance built for us over thousands and thousands of years in the form of gender roles, traditional lifestyles, hard work, objectivity, and cultural supremacy was, in fact, painfully stupid.
Is it really such a step forward that our civilization, which once shed both blood and ink debating Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, is now reduced to considering theses like VICE Magazine’s “Dear Straight Guys: It’s Time to Start Putting Things In Your Butt?” Is this all there is, or can we do better?
What has infected modern education: the curse of the postmodernist, deconstructionist professors making their long march through the institutions.
The “Baby Boom” refers to the massive explosion of children that came into the world after World War II and the Great Depression.
Unfortunately, the problem with having kids right after all the bad stuff happens is that none of those kids remember it or is grateful to you for surviving it. So when Western Boomers emerged into the world, it was easy for them to take the unprecedented prosperity in which they found themselves for granted. Which, naturally, led to them being absolutely unwilling to absorb the tough-minded values of their parents — values which had made that prosperity possible in the first place. Instead, they wanted to start a new generation of love, of peace, and of no mean authoritative figures.
When the Boomers showed up: a process that began with the emergence of the Soviet Union, when professors reared on the progressive notions of government-by-expertise fell in love with communism, and fell out with religion. Bill Buckley, otherwise known as the first college student to troll his campus, documented this phenomenon in his book “God and Man at Yale.”
Needless to say, when this mass influx of spoiled brats hit the universities, everything went exactly as Buckley predicted. The genteel, rational academics of Buckley’s day saw their authority brutally supplanted by the Boomer campus protestors. In place of the cucked, rationalistic progressivism of the past, those students brought a much more dangerous set of ideas: ideas incubated in a movement that came be known as the New Left. Or, as I call them, Social Justice Warriors Mark 1.
You can literally trace almost everything that makes Social Justice Warriors intolerable today to the New Left. This is because the most fundamental element of New Left thought is a near total rejection of freedom, morality, and of reason in theory, combined with the abuse of all three in practice.
It started with relentless campus disruptions by students in the name of free speech and inquiry. The infamous protests at the University of California at Berkeley were even conducted in the name of a “free speech movement,” though given how violent, ugly, and childish they got, it would be more accurate to call it the “WHAT ABOUT MY FREE SPEECH” movement. Still, tactics aside, these protests would’ve been admirable in principle if the New Left had put their money when their mouths were and embraced dissent once they took power in the universities. Of course, they didn’t. Instead, their supposed.
Remember that term I mentioned earlier? “The Long March Through the Institutions?” Well, I didn’t make that term up. It was actually coined by German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke. Dutschke’s plan, named for an actual military campaign by Mao Tse Tung (charming), was that students should learn all the necessary skills to assume power within the highest professions, including and especially the academy, only to turn around and form a unified leftist bloc once that power had been achieved. Furthermore, they would eradicate the very ideas that would make challenging their worldview possible: particularly ideas like free thought and objective reason.
Older communist academics like the Frankfurt School professor Herbert Marcuse loved Dutschke’s ideas. In fact, Marcuse later wrote to Dutschke, calling his strategy “the only effective way” to achieve the communist domination required to achieve utopia.
Two of the figures who were inspired by the May 1968 protests would end up turning the cancer started by the likes of Marcuse into weapons-grade plague. Their names are Michel Foucault, also known as the founding thinker of poststructuralism, and Jacques Derrida, also known as the founding thinker of deconstructionism.
Behind these stuffy, academic sounding names lurked madness. In Foucault’s case, literally, seeing as his first book — Madness and Civilization (1960) — essentially argued that mental health (and, by extension, sanity and reason) was nothing more than a construct designed by society to keep the oppressed down. He would later argue that all of society was organized along the same lines as a prison in Discipline and Punish (1975), with the powerful as jailers. I could go on, but suffice to say that if you set out to create an academic rationalization for paranoid schizophrenia, you couldn’t do much worse than Foucault.
Where Foucault argued that mental health was a social construct, Derrida argued that language itself was a social construct designed by the powerful to keep the oppressed down. Yes, according to Derrida, there should be absolutely nothing wrong with publishing incomprehensible word salad as serious academic analysis, and to prove his point, he made a career out of doing precisely that. And he was taken seriously!
When an idiotic Harvard student demands that research be subjected to tests of “academic justice” that forbid “racism, sexism, and heterosexism,”10 she’s just recycling Marcuse. When whales like Cora Segal bemoan the all-powerful, ableist patriarchy between masturbating to SuperWhoLock11 GIFs on Tumblr, they’re just eating the decades old word vomit of Michel Foucault. And when professors like my old nemesis Frank Moran stick illiterate garbage on the cover pages of exams and demand it be called poetry, or spout ill-informed political rants and demand they be treated as scholarship, they’re clearly marching in the same insane steps as Jacques Derrida.
After Trump clinched the nomination, a particularly sad outfit known as the Buckley Club ran an item titled “The Intellectual Case for Banning Conservative Millennials.” Their causes for complaint can be boiled down to the fact that conservative millennials enjoy tweaking liberals, being snarky, having fun, and generally not acting like the kind of uptight, over-earnest bowtie addicts the movement previously found so easy to control.
The word “neoconservative” is a neologism that started in the early 1970s to describe a class of mostly New York-based intellectuals who had converted to being conservatives due to cultural issues, anticommunism, and perhaps most importantly, opposition to SJW campus protesters.
Remember those cucked professors who Bill Buckley made fun of in his book? Well, let’s just say they weren’t happy with having their comfy academic privileges seized from them by a bunch of vagabond hippies. This group, led by the likes of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, and Midge Decter, were some of the first to defect to the conservative movement, terming themselves “neoconservatives.” Irving Kristol even coined a cute little definition for the term: “A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.”
The vehicle they would eventually use to cuck the conservative movement entirely was another silver spoon wielding heir to political privilege — George W. Bush. Smaller wonder still that this coddled second generation of neoconservative legacy kids — Bill Kristol (son of Irving), John Podhoretz (son of Norman), and Jonah Goldberg (son of Lucianne), to name a few — would come to form a “who’s who” of the most bitter, entitled #NeverTrump pundits. Like W, they went through life skating by on their last names, and were enraged that newer, younger right-wingers weren’t impressed.
Milton Friedman famously said that you can’t have open borders and a welfare state. Even open borders libertarian types agree that this is correct. The problem is that they think you can get rid of the welfare state by having open borders. This demonstrably hasn’t worked in the United States, in Europe, or anywhere else. Instead, when prosperous nations with generous welfare states throw open their doors and refuse to enforce their borders, the new populations agitate for more benefits, and sometimes even manage to vote for them thanks to fraud. As these benefits increase, so do the incentives for more poor immigrants to pour across the border, who turn around and vote themselves more goodies, which produces more immigrants, and so on and so on until the entire government goes broke.
Open borders inevitably lead to the collapse of not just the welfare state, but the whole state, due to over-extended welfare systems.
In 1971, during Pierre Trudeau’s reign, Canada was the first country in the world to adopt state multiculturalism as official policy. If you look his son, Canada’s current prime minister Justin Trudeau, it should be obvious to you at this point that the worm-eaten apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. By now, it should be obvious how cancerous the dedication by both Trudeau’s to a “multicultural” state has been throughout the West.
Unchecked immigration is a moral eyesore. It asks our states to fail their most basic obligations by putting the needs of faceless, dubiously friendly strangers over the needs of the citizens they exist to protect and serve.
The multicultural worldview that promotes unchecked immigration is not about fulfilling the obligations of a government toward its own people. It is instead a recklessly naïve, utopian view of the world holding hands, loving each other, and singing Kumbaya, even though all of history, social science, and common sense militate against that actually happening.
The experiment of multiculturalism was thought up in the minds of tenured intellectuals, put on paper by virtue signaling politicians, and then enjoyed by big business globalists. All while high-fiving each other from behind the walls and security crossings of their own gated communities. God forbid they apply the policies of those gated communities to their countries, rather than using them as shields against the consequences of their own naivete.
I actually was taught about globalism and globalists by name in my international relations class as a genuine political philosophy with genuine adherents. But as soon as I brought them up as a dangerous group on the Internet, a bunch of edgy “centrists” snarked at me that they’re all a right-wing conspiracy. Hell, even The New York Times quoted me in outrage as representing a “far-right conspiracy buoyed by Trump.” Tellingly, they never bothered to refute anything I said.
Defenders of globalism define it as being “interconnected by removing cultural and legal barriers,” or as “the pooling of states’ sovereignty into supranational organizations.”
In plain English this means that globalists wish to treat every country in the world like an unruly toddler, with international bureaucrats filling the role of daycare instructor.
Individualism and unique identity is the antithesis of global government. It’s the antithesis of the European Union, of the United Nations, of the World Bank.
This is why globalists hold contempt for citizenship, tradition, national culture and religion. These things promote sovereignty of nations — they create unique identities for nations.
The first goal of Marxists was to destroy the family and the church because both were foundations for one’s life. You could count on both to support you, you could count on them to give you guidance. But for Marxists and their progressive allies, it was essential that government fill both roles: both as your last line of support, and as the people with the power to set the agenda for your life.
The necessary precondition for bigotry is not cruelty, but untruth. It may be cruel to shoot a wolf charging at your child with its jaws slavering, but it is not bigoted. Wolves are predators. They pose danger to defenseless humans.
The left tries to disguise the genuine dangers in Islamic doctrine behind moral equivalency. What about Christianity and Judaism? Don’t they have barbaric ideas? And sure, there are parts of the holy books of practically every religion that would offend our modern enlightenment-era sensibilities. But there are also centuries of theology that have been written since those holy books that have rendered the offending passages inoperable in the minds of all but the most fanatical believers. Some of these believers are obviously dangerous in their own right — for example, the largely Christian governments of Uganda and Nigeria are difficult to distinguish from Islamic ones in terms of brutality — but globally, they are obvious exceptions. The rest of their faiths have made peace with the enlightenment, and with the ideas that make modern life possible.
The Crusades had nothing to do with Christian extremism or imperialism. The opposite is true. The Crusades happened in part because the Caliphate of the time was viciously and relentlessly persecuting Christians who lived in the areas now thought of as Israel and Palestine.
The Crusaders did absolutely nothing wrong. The religious tradition they were defending would ultimately be responsible for everything from the creation of higher learning in the West, to the Protestant work ethic that powered capitalism’s rise, to the Enlightenment, and yes, even to the development of universalist ideas that many of today’s leftists still believe in without realizing their origins.
Islam’s ambition has been the destruction of Christendom — which is to say, not just Christians, but Jews, European Pagans, and everyone else living under the banner of Western culture — since Muhammad dreamed it up between child brides.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has denounced something called “emotivism,” or the idea that morality is only an expression of emotion.
SJWs in general are to emotivism what Walter White was to crystal meth: manufacturers of its purest, most dangerous form.
Suppressing words doesn’t make the ideas those words represent go away. It just makes the people who hold those ideas harder to spot, because they go underground, or keep quiet publicly. Some may even be radicalized and come to hold more extreme versions of those ideas – ideas that they see no reason not to act on in equally extreme ways, since the words will get them in trouble anyway. This is actually quite likely, due to a psychological phenomenon called reactance, which makes people immediately want to do anything they’re told not to do in the most lurid way possible.
Free speech is often a way for extremists to identify themselves to the rest of society, and also a good release valve for hard-wired psychological impulses that otherwise might lead to violence.
Feminists want to amputate something that is just a part of human nature — the fact that sex makes women more vulnerable, both emotionally and physically, than men.
The Boomer left is trapped in a fantasy of the glory days where they could wax rhapsodic about fighting the system and saving the world from war, all while they prop up a system that expropriates the incomes of millennials and gives it back to Boomers as entitlements. The Boomer right is equally trapped in a fantasy of the glory days where they could pretend to bestride the world like a colossus from junior staffer positions in the Bush administration(s), where we never run out of taxes to cut, or of younger, poorer people to kill in the wars they start, and where they can execute a hypocrisy-free pivot from sexual hedonism to neo-Victorian moralizing the instant people stop wanting to sleep with them.
We know that globalism is built on the twin pillars of imported cheap labor and exported jobs, which boost the Third World at the expense of the First, treat increased crime as an acceptable cost for increased GDP, and which transform self-reliant nations of builders into cringing nations of servants.
We know the future, if left to the hands of the average millennial, is an Ugg boot stomping on a human face, forever.
Nationalism is what builds societies, and yes, just like how millennials take self-esteem too far, folks like Hitler, Mussolini, or Malik Shabazz take nationalism too far.
Trump saw something with greater moral clarity than other politicians: that a nation which tries to sustain potentially endless numbers of illegal immigrants can never tend to its own garden and may some day become the very place people seek to escape. People come here because we have great shares of resources, but resources are not infinite, and a nation with 30 million immigrants whose welfare checks outpace their taxes is a nation whose scarce resources will only get scarcer and scarcer. Yes, it’s something of a compliment that so many people want to come to countries like America, just as it’s a compliment for the prettiest girl in school to have every man asking her out. But if that girl lets all those guys into her, her body will get used up fast, and the same thing goes for a country. To borrow a line from the feminists, sometimes no means no. The Trump campaign was America’s rape whistle.
Not that we have to say no to everyone, or even most people. After all, Trump never foreclosed the possibility of a generous immigration policy. He repeatedly talked about the “big, beautiful door” he wanted to build in his wall.
Despite specious comparisons of anti-Muslim sentiment to anti-Semitic prejudices that gave rise to the Holocaust, the fact is that Islamic immigrants have brought a wave of anti-Semitism down on Europe. Their intolerance extends beyond Jews, however. More than half of British Muslims seek a legal ban on homosexuality. Shariah law courts systematically abuse women everywhere hat they exist. A majority of Muslims in almost every country where they live say a wife must obey her husband. One Muslim cleric caught on tape even defended sex with nine year olds because Muhammad did it. Anti-Muslim sentiment makes you a Nazi? No, it makes you someone who wants nothing to do with a people who are Nazis in all but name. It’s no accident that Hitler and his SJW heirs love these people. Doesn’t mean we have to.
Immigration policy in the West simply fails to be remotely meritocratic. Immigrants are not let in to fill niches where our countries need help, or to contribute in some way to society. It’s even considered controversial in some circles to suggest that immigrants should be able to pull their own weight. All of this must be reversed. In the U.S., a good start would be repealing the Immigration Act of 1965, so that things like national origin can be factored into our calculus, and so that limits on immigration from other Western countries can be removed. Everywhere else, the same sort of measures must be taken.
The Statue of Liberty’s base might say “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but fun fact: that inscription wasn’t on the original statue. Rather, it was chiseled on at the request of the wealthy New York donors who’d built the pedestal. Which just goes to show that the rich donors from new York haven’t been right about immigration in over a century. In the new nationalist world, it may be that we still take the tired and poor. But at the very least, we should only do so provided that hey also yearn to breath free, and free in the sense understood historically by Western civilization.
Entitlement culture must be destroyed. In the 60s, the U.K. and America had a culture that would leave one ashamed to be on the dole, to not have a job. So great was this stigma that up until the mid-60s, even liberal Democrats saw it as their goal to get Americans off the dole, and would have succeeded if not for over-perfectionism and white guilt getting in the way.
Self-fulfilling prophecies of cynicism have replaced the classical ideas that you can achieve anything you want if you work hard; that every man, no matter what his skin color or class, can beat the next through pure power of will; that all our wildest dreams of flying in the sky, mastering the sea and even going to space can be achieved. The young Americans who once had sparkles in their eyes and dreams of a better future now have only resentment, envy, and blame for others. It’s time we told the people who taught them this nonsense that no, it’s not that no one can beat the odds and the privileges of others: it’s just that you’re too weak.