"national divorce"

morally speaking.

Simon Laird is back at it again, advocating for a breakup of the United States, instigated by Russia.

First of all, I agree with Simon. Nationalism and national populism (his ideology) is bankrupt, decrepit, an old wineskin that cannot continue. The future is not filled with nation states, but with transnational religions, ideologies, empires, terrorist networks, network states, multi-national corporations, and global civilizations. NATO globalism transcends the nation state.

None of that implies that America is likely to break up peacefully. None of that justifies treason.

Morally, the dissident right broadly supports destroying America. They claim that America should be destroyed, Sodom and Gomorrah style, because:

• People castrate their children, as was done in Europe up until the 18th century;

• White people aren’t shown sufficient deference and respect;

• Jeffrey Epstein bought and sold teenage sex slaves, as was legal in America until 1870;¹

• Men are not shown sufficient deference and respect;

• 50% of income goes to taxes;

• People are gay;

• Porn exists;

• Black people riot sometimes, causing a 0.0037% reduction to GDP every 10 years;

• People do drugs and die;

• Women have the right to abort babies, as occurred in the form of “exposure” infanticide in every pre-modern society, including Sparta;

• Cellphones exist;

• Woke people will cancel you if you:

  • call people with Down’s Syndrome “retarded”

  • use the wrong pronouns

  • use slurs.

Please leave a comment below if you feel I have missed any reasons why you think America should be broken up into a patchwork of independent states.

The real reason, however, isn’t any of these illegitimate gripes and complaints. The real reason is that people are bored and want meaning in their lives. America is awesome. It is rich, it is safe, it is healthy, it is free, it is amazing. Even the illegal stuff is quite accessible.

You can do cocaine and get away with it. There are prostitutes in Las Vegas. You can gamble. You can go to a gun range and shoot Tannerite and blow things up. Millions of people do psychedelics, talk about it on podcasts, and the government does nothing. Many things which are supposedly illegal are in fact semi-legal.

For the last 8 years, pollsters have underestimated the Trump vote three times in a row. Betting markets were much better predictors. Its easy to talk, but harder to put your money where your mouth is. If Nate Silver makes a dumb prediction, he doesn’t get punished, but still has a job. If you bet, you get punished.

I think of migration as an example of putting your money where your mouth is. If America were truly an evil country, we would see natural-born Americans fleeing for greener pastures. They don’t — quite the opposite. More people leave China than move there; Russia allows mass migration from the third world to fill industrial demand, but the most educated Russkiye are fleeing the country.

You could also say that America sucks because no one has kids. Low fertility is evidence that people have no future; gender wars are destroying marriage; everyone is gay; abortionists are sacrificing babies to Moloch. If any of that were true, we should expect that Russia and China, as the shining cities on the hill of heteronormative “common sense conservatism,” have higher fertility. They do not.

Despite my insistence that you should not be an anti-trans extremist, Simon is correct that the right sincerely believes that the left has gone insane. Right-wingers seem to believe that America is like your best friend that just got bitten by a zombie. Do you let your friend become a full blown zombie, or shoot him in the head so he can die with human dignity?

The right wing imagines that “if they’ll turn our kids trans, eventually, this country will look like South Africa or Zimbabwe.” They believe this is some kind of inevitable process because of the form of government. If we had a series of Mad Max micro-states, or made Ron DeSantis King of the Republic of Florida,² right-wingers believe this sort of localism would “bring back sanity.”

My own personal calculation is that I would rather endure a 7000% increase in transgender children than see a breakup of America.

From 2014 to 2023, there was a 4.33x increase in transgender identity among 18-24 year olds, from 0.59% to 3.08%. In linear terms, that would be an increase of 0.28% per year, and it will take over 300 years for American kids to become 100% trans. However, if the trend remains exponential, the Compound Annual Growth rate is 16.6%, and American kids will become 100% trans by 2047.

I don’t actually model the “woke mind virus” in this way, because among Amish and Orthodox Jewish and Mormon Fundamentalist communities, the increase in trans identification is 0%. If you want to live a woke-free life in America, you are free to do so. No one is forcing you to put a TV in your home, to give your kids a cellphone, or to send them to public school. You are free to insulate your children from the wider culture.

If you really want to extrapolate trends, the Amish will become a majority of Americans by 2200. Assuming that the American population stays stuck at around 335 million, by 2200, 34.93% of the population will be Amish, and 51.77% of the population will be trans. By 2300, 94.52% of the population will be Amish, and 79.44% will be trans.

This is all a little bit silly, because trans kids have only been more than 1% of the population for the last 10 years. Taking a new 10 year trend and extrapolating it out 100 years to predict the collapse of (Amish) civilization is fairly short-sighted.

Here are some things that could also happen in 200 years:

• Embryo selection allows mixed race people to choose the hair, eye, and skin color of their children, creating an entirely new conception of race;

• Lab-grown surrogacy becomes cheap and safe, allowing any man to basically buy/farm as many children as they can financially support without needing to ever interact with a woman;

• The genes for intelligence are discovered, and human intelligence rapidly increases.

Maybe those things sound horrifying to you. If so, advocating for the breakup of America to prevent transhumanism is a morally consistent position. However, this means one of two things:

1. America will unilaterally technologically disarm, while China continues to advance, meaning China takes over the world;

2. American technological disarmament means that transhumanism never occurs, and we are stuck forever in a loop of dysgenic superstition until civilization really does collapse.

Both of those options are more horrifying to me than the actual effects of transhumanism themselves.

This is not the Soviet Union.

I could have written about how logistically the Deep State is never going to let you secede. If you try to do that, they will crush you, because you are not a serious person. The United States government is fully willing to bomb people who threaten its existence, and you are not smarter or more fanatical than these people.

It is funny to me that non-religious deists think they are going to succeed where hardcore neo-Nazis and communists before them failed. With the help of Russia of course, which has trouble keeping its own government from falling apart. Or China, which is currently doing just great.

Comparisons to the Soviet Union are very superficial. The Soviet Union underwent a revolution after Stalin’s death, where they immediately started condemning Stalin and destroying the entire mythology of the state. It would be like if in 1960, JFK started blowing up monuments to George Washington and denouncing Eisenhower as a war criminal. Khrushchev hollowed out and defanged the Russian state, because he degraded and demoralized its very reason for existence: Stalinism. All of that occurred in 1954.

Anatoly Chubais, the CIA asset who oversaw the privatization of the Soviet economy, was born in 1955. That is not a coincidence. Khrushchev laid the groundwork for privatization by destroying the myth of the Soviet state. Everyone who was born after 1955 basically didn’t believe in communism anymore.

You could argue that this is what China and Russia are attempting to do now: egg on America’s self-destruction by “wokeness,” a sort of Americanized “de-Stalinization” process, where we continually denounce the crimes of the Founding Fathers.

The problem with this is that the CIA beat the Soviets to the punch on this game. America both invented and defeated communism.³ Taking the last 10 years of wokeness and extrapolating that into a grand narrative about America’s “inevitable and unavoidable decline,” combining it with distorted economic trends and saccharine nostalgia for the 1950s, is a bit much. American movies, American music, American money, and the American navy still runs the world. The Soviets never had that level of soft power. The Soviet threat was exaggerated, in part because there were genuinely a number of American communists. But even if America did become a communist country like China, it is doubtful that it would have gotten along with the Russians. Russia could not have “won” the Cold War.

Similarly, Russia and China today are still junior trading partners who depend on American financial infrastructure. Empires never really collapse from within, but are always “pushed over” by an outside power. America hasn’t even begun to experiment with real tyranny or Caesarism. The idea that the federal government is going to give up and hand over trillions of dollars worth of military equipment to independent states in a peaceful “national divorce” is very silly.

Realistically speaking, conservative fantasies about the end of America can help drive down military recruitment and lower trust in institutions. That results in things like January 6th. It doesn’t collapse the state or accomplish any conservative goals directly, but it is costly and violent. As a result, the state can react either with a carrot or a stick. A carrot would be something like a Trump 2024 victory, which gives conservatives symbolic and meaningless victories on banning trans surgeries for minors. A stick would be something like censorship:

Anyone contemplating national divorce is implying that we’ve run out of options and have nowhere to go. Boosting Russian propaganda might be one way to earn a few carrots from the state, but it also might result in some sticks. I think it is fundamentally dishonest, but lies (bluffing) can galvanizes enough of a mob to extort change.

I see conservatives like the Longshoreman’s Union. They are threatening to destroy the country if they don’t get what they want. As someone who benefits greatly from the existence of America, I am not sympathetic to these threats of extortion. I would prefer that conservatives declare their loyalty to the state, and make positive, rational, well-reasoned arguments on how to improve the country.

Most of their ideas, however, are not rational and well-reasoned, but selfish and spiteful. “Ban the gays.” Not an argument. I am against this kind of aesthetic sentimentality. You are free to be homophobic, but because you cannot convince intelligent or powerful people that homophobia advances the common good, all you have left is extortion, threats, and temper tantrums, like “national divorce.” Good luck!

1. The thirteenth amendment was ratified in Texas in 1870. There were no effective regulations on sexual intercourse with enslaved children.

2. Republics can’t have kings by definition, but no one is going to notice that when reading this.

3. Sources in the show notes of this podcast.