why i'm on the left.

(i'm jewish)

I did a podcast with Alex Kaschuta:

The podcast went well, and I hope to speak with her again. Here’s the Substack audio-only version if you prefer:

Losing our religion - Deep Left Analysis

I don’t follow right-wing e-drama too closely, but I’ve been informed by third parties that Alex is being “canceled” by former friends and associates for not toeing the party line on certain issues. I’m not sure exactly what those issues are, but maybe the comment section of my interview is some indication:

Not all the comments are like this. There are some positive ones too. But you get the point.

Here is my take away:

• Tech is bad;

• Living in the woods is good (sent from iPad);

• Biotech is fake (vaccines don’t work);

• Biotech is evil (vaccines are genocide);

• Big words make grug mad;

• Jews bad;

• White good.

I find these sentiments to be boring, stale, and useless. Intelligent right-wingers seem to be inevitably persecuted by the loud and noxious minority which plagues that “community.” While I am open to having my ideas challenged by my opponents, I am also grateful that I am not constantly under attack “by my own side.”

is leftism useless gibberish?

I accept the constructive criticism that I am verbose, loquacious, and circumlocuitous. If I had the terseness of a Spartan, I’d be a better communicator for these people. Writing sometimes helps me limit my tendency to go on rants and tangents, but sometimes I can’t help myself… There is probably some deep-seated emotional or personality defect causing this compulsion (narcissism? anxiety?). A little more self awareness of this fact will probably make me more effective and less of a “turn off” to any audience.

But it’s also possible that being “wordy” is just a permanent feature of the leftist psyche. Who is more wordy than a priest, with his repetitions, mantras, lectures, prayers, and sermons? Priests are obsessed with words, and find them to be powerful and comforting. Christ is the Logos, the word, and the Torah is the word of God. God didn’t give Moses a sword, staff, or cloak, but the written word on stone tablets.

Even Socrates, who never wrote anything, still seemed to love talking. He was “edgy,” especially when it caused confusion and frustration, for both sides of an argument! Instead of shying away from “hot button issues,” Socrates pressed on, to the consternation of his opponents. Many accused Socrates of talking in circles, and making no sense.

Socrates, in his time, was accused of “corrupting the youth,” which seems to be the charge against me, “a proponent of man made horrors beyond our comprehension.” What did I say that was so wrong? Am I really that scary?

Maybe this is another fatal fault of mine, but I attempt to understand my opposition. Why are they so scared of technology? What does technology represent to them? Are they just afraid of change, being reactionaries and conservatives?

The RFK phenomenon and the Gribble voter demonstrates that this phenomenon isn’t new. Alex Jones got his start by attacking George Bush and “fascist eugenics.” George Soros is a secret Nazi, as is Bill Gates. White supremacists run the world, and they want to destroy humanity. Candace Owens, following Kanye, is updating this story with a black feminine sheen, proclaiming that Israel is a secret Fourth Reich, run by “fake Jews.”

It is true that, traditionally, the left has its own conspiratorial tradition, involving Anglo capitalists, “fascism as a tool of capitalism,” the crack epidemic, the drug wars, the CIA, black genocide, AIDs as a bioweapon, and Afrocentrism. It’s true that Kamala will occasionally speak with a black conspiracy theorist, and nod her head as he suggests that black people should have their own legal code, separate from whites, to protect them from white supremacy.

This is regrettable. But I am more tolerant of black people believing crazy conspiracies than when white people do it. This is because while black people are prone to burning down their local 7/11, white people are more prone to attacking federal buildings. The first is a form of economic self-harm, largely self-contained to black neighborhoods. I wish black people wouldn’t do that to their own neighborhoods. But, since I have the privilege to not live there, it’s not really at the top of my priorities to stop them from doing it once every five-to-twenty years. On the other hand, conspiracies among whites tend to do greater damage to the overall stability of the federal governing structure, which is generally how you get wars and dictators. I don’t want either community to act out, but one is clearly worse than the other.

freedom and humiliation.

Just as the right is fueled by class anxiety and resentment, so is much of the left. Millions of people feel left behind, abandoned, betrayed, stolen from, abused, discarded, ignored, persecuted, and mistreated. Every political system in history has engaged in these crimes to one degree or another, and so there will always be a section of the population which feels oppressed.

Historically, elites were open about this: “You are my slave. I own you.” With the rise of democracy, that rhetoric is out of fashion. Instead, everyone is supposed to be free, and deserves equal rights. Every functional religion has a central lie, and this is the central lie of democracy.

Machiavelli praised Switzerland as the prime example of a free society, because of the liberties which it afforded its citizens: freedom from war, freedom from oppressive taxation, freedom from corruption and abuse, and a degree of freedom of thought.¹ Yet Machiavelli also recognized that religion was necessary for the stability of all societies, including Switzerland.² Without religion, a state cannot defend itself during periods of crisis, which always inevitably arrive.

Some atheists maintain that religion is not necessary, since the west (as well as east Asia) is largely secular. But this is a misunderstanding of what religion is, as a psychological mechanism. Religion is not necessarily a belief in God, or Platonic metaphysics, or “spirituality.” Religion is a set of irrational axioms which create a regime of humiliation.

The Spartan Krypteia ritualistically humiliated the Helots by harassing, raping, murdering, and torturing them. Athenian schoolmasters sexually abused young boys or teenagers as a symbol of the unlimited power of the pedagogue. American slave masters whipped their slaves, and worse.

These were brutal and physical forms of humiliation. More “sophisticated” societies reject physical torture, and substitute psychological torture: social exclusion, guilt, shame, name-calling, black-balling, and “canceling.” As social creatures, the pain of social exclusion can exceed that of death. This is why people often cite public speaking as scarier than death itself.

social death.

There is an evolutionary reason for this. If you die in battle, your children (or at least your cousins) may live on because of your sacrifice. But if you are socially excluded from society, this brings shame upon all your relatives, hurting their reproductive chances as well. Being the “son of a fallen warrior” raises social status and breeding opportunities. Being the “son of a coward” depresses intergenerational social standing.

In this sense, we can never be free from the threat of humiliation, because humiliation in some form is always necessary to maintain order, whether in physical or psychological form. There are some historical caste systems, like that of Sparta, which granted greater freedom for the higher caste than the lower caste. In this sense, the well-bred Spartans are more free than the Helots. But a Spartan is not free to breed with a Helot, and if he does so, his descendants will incur humiliation. Otherwise, if interbreeding occurs freely, the caste system falls apart, and becomes unsustainable.

who shall be free?

There has never been (and never will be) a perfectly free society. There will always be an underclass: call them slaves, serfs, peasants, workers, or whatever. Advocating for the “rights” of this class is an act of aggression, since granting freedom for one class always results in the humiliation of another class.

The question is: which class deserves humiliation least, and which class deserves humiliation most? In other words, which class is most valuable? Who should rule? There are a few ways of determining this:

• Moral performance;

• Wealth;

• Intelligence.

Moral performance is the most familiar and common form of class hierarchy. Moral performance refers to shibboleths, like “Christ is king!” or “white silence is violence!” The lowest level of moral performance is the monotonous collective repetition of slogans, like the apostle’s creed: “I believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth…”

A deeper level of moral performance exists at the level of symbolic actions, like taking communion; participating in a protest; putting a black square up as your profile picture; putting up a rainbow flag or Trump sign on your front lawn. Finally, the deepest level of moral performance is “inward” or “self-contained” performance. This type of performance is meant to be a dialogue within the self. 4,000 years ago, the “Dispute of a man with his Ba (soul)” demonstrates that the Egyptians had a concept of “inward performance.”

Consider Matthew 6:1:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

In other words, Christ is saying that the greatest form of morality is that which is performed inwardly and privately, and not outwardly. Seek to be seen by God, not by man. This ethic is still alive among woke hierarchs, who denounce LGBTQ flags of corporations as merely “performative” signaling. Their criticism is that mere slogans and flags are not enough. Corporations, if they wish to gain the approval of the woke, must look deep within themselves and deconstruct their own heteronormativity and white supremacy, just as the Egyptian disputes with his Ba, and the Christian repents to God.

Moral performances, whether superficial or inward, are egalitarian, in the sense that even the poorest among us can be Christian or gay or a BIPOC ally. Moral performance requires no intelligence or wealth.

What about wealth and intelligence? The right-wing is very quick to say that whites are the wealthiest and smartest — but not so fast! What about Jews and Asians? What about those liberal coastal elitists at Ivy League schools? Using wealth and intelligence as a meritocratic standard for humiliation results in the humiliation of poor, dumb people, including the right-wing base. Rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash are humiliated, and the right objects. “Hey, we’re all white! Stop attacking your own people!”

The right-wing, retreating from the “incomprehensible horrors” of opioid addiction, prefers a different kind of moral performance than the left. This moral performance is justified on historical, cultural, and even biological grounds. Whiteness becomes the axiom of morality, because it exists materially, in the real world.

what do WASPs want?

My objection to this narrative is that no state has ever been held together by “mere whiteness” alone. Even the white supremacy which dominated America until 1925 always had a Christian (Protestant) religion, an English language, and an Anglo-Saxon ethnicity at its center.

White nationalists would argue that this is no contradiction, and we should “retvrn” to the rule of the WASP. But is this possible? Do WASPs even want to regain the majority, or are they happier as minoritarian colonial overlords, in coalition with non-white elites?

Whereas WASPs were 90% of Americans in 1776, and probably 80% during the Civil War, they quickly declined to less than 50% of the population by WWII, and now represent less than 20%.

What makes this final number even worse (approaching something like 3%) is the fact that most Anglo-Saxons have lost their original “mainline” churches, including Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians. Instead, they have devolved into being Baptists, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, or even “non-denominational.”

This is a bigger problem than right-wingers understand. Denominations matter. The original mainline Anglo-Saxon churches maintained a history, lineage, genealogies, folklore, folkways, songs, structure, dress codes, dances, traditions, moral teachings, political leanings, and endogamous marriages.

Baptists, Pentecostals, and Evangelicals have all conducted a form of cultural genocide against the original WASP way of life. Some upper class WASPs attempted to resist this, deriding the new churches as “low church” as opposed to the original “high church.” But they were not successful. The mainline churches, a shadow of their former selves, continue their decline, as WASPs either become Evangelicals, atheists, or liberals.

LARPing as WASPs

Most white nationalists fall under one of four camps:

1. Foreign ethnics (Irish, Italian, Slavic), totally alien to the WASP culture which founded America;

2. WASPs who have abandoned Christianity entirely, and do not understand the need to replace it with anything other than biological determinism;

3. WASPs who have adopted a foreign ethnic religion as their own (trad Catholicism, Orthodoxy);

4. WASPs who maintain some kind of adherence to a mainline church.

I would say that broadly speaking, 90% of white nationalists belong in the first three categories. If the last 10% exists at all, it has no representation among the leadership: America First is dominated by Catholics; wignats are dominated by paganism, atheism, agnosticism, or esoteric Hitlerism.

The right as a bucket of crabs, pulling each other down.

White nationalists claim, effectively, that WASP culture doesn’t matter, or at least, it has nothing to do with mainline churches. The truth is that there is one area that WASP culture survived, in an evolved form… establishment liberalism! The Boston Brahmin, George Bush, the Ivy League, coastal elites, Nantucket: The WASP lives on in the liberal establishment. If you truly love the WASP, you must follow him to the dark side. Of course, most right-wingers are economically impoverished, psychologically jilted, vengeful, resentful, and downwardly mobile. They don’t have the capacity to join the elite, even if they wanted to. Since they feel that their future is hopeless, they seek to burn the system down, joker style.

Right-wingers are very similar to other so-called victimized or oppressed groups in this way. If you say, “hmm, seems like all the smart people are liberal; maybe we should work within that system to correct any fundamental errors rather than snipe from the sidelines?” The response is: “Jew! Race traitor! Subversive! Uncle Tom! They’ll never accept you! You’re just a slave like the rest of us!”

The ultimate right-wing fantasy.

The right-wing explanation for why elites are liberal is that WASPs are “shabbos goyim,” controlled by the Jews, “cucked,” or “useful idiots.” They claim that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Gates, the Walton family, and the Koch family have either all been “tricked and fooled,” or they are part of a Jewish conspiracy, or they are pedophile lizard people in league with Satan. No one hates wealthy, smart WASPs more than the right wing. The right wing thinks they are smarter and more moral than America’s richest WASP families. They consider these WASPs to be “traitors to their people,” worthy of public torture and execution.

I have a bit more respect for WASPs. I believe that most elites throughout history are more intelligent than the average person, and I think most of them act in what they believe their rational interest is. During the Civil War, southern slave owners understood that the abolition of slavery would destroy their personal wealth. As a result, they rationally³ sent hundreds of thousands of men into battle on their behalf. Elites throughout history have proven themselves capable of defending their interests with violence, even sometimes risking their own lives to do so.

non-elites are cattle.

During the feudal era, elites genetically and biologically replaced the lower classes. They did this by using peasants as farm equipment, or oxen, forcing them to till the fields. They hoarded wealth for themselves, allowing peasants to go hungry and die during famine, while preserving themselves. Consider the following:

Assume that a peasant has, on average, 5 children, and 3 of them die before adulthood (effective TFR around 2.1). Assume an aristocrat has 8 children, and 3 of them also die (effective TFR of 5). Let’s say that there are 99 peasants for every 1 aristocrat.

Gen 1: 99 peasants, 2 aristocrats
Gen 2: 99 peasants, 6 aristocrats
…
Gen 5: 99 peasants, 98 aristocrats
…
Gen 8: 99 peasants, 1526 aristocrats.

This is basic math. However, due to primogeniture, not all aristocrats remain aristocrats. Some of them get “bumped down” into the lower classes, and eventually become peasants themselves. The result is peasant genocide: a wholesale genetic population replacement of the lower classes with originally upper class stock.

This occurred in Great Britain in 2500 BC through a slightly more violent and invasive mechanism. The natives (at that time) of Britain (migrants from Anatolia) were invaded and replaced by Indo-European Bell Beakers. The genetic and archaeological evidence shows this was done violently, with Bell Beakers stealing Anatolian women, but not sharing their women with the Anatolians. The result was Anatolian genocide in the British Isles.

This is historically normal. The Chinese did it in Asia, the Bantu did it in Africa, Siberians may have done it in the Americas, and so on and so forth.

From Richard Lynn, Dysgenics. (1996)

Modernity has created an exception to this trend. In the 19th century, the upper classes began to decline while the lower classes expanded. In the 20th century, “developing countries” expanded, while the “developed world” contracted. The right wing believes they have the solution:

1. Establishment of a national socialist state (but Kamala is a fascist);

2. Eugenic policies (but vaccines are eugenics);

3. Wars of imperial expansion and genocide (but not against Russia or China).

They see Trump as a “move in the right direction.” They believe that after Trump comes Vance, after Vance comes Tucker, after Tucker comes Darryl Cooper… The Overton Window shatters! Nick Fuentes becomes president!!1

Yet, in the real world, the right wing is advocating against abortion, in favor of natalism, and believes that women should be forced (or at least shamed) to marry incels and stop engaging in hypergamy. The right wing makes fun of “childless cat ladies,” instead of respecting their reproductive choices. The right wing seeks to force mediocre or mentally ill people to have kids, “for the economy,” or because “God said so.”

The right is schizophrenically fractured. Eugenicists really think that hitching their bandwagon to Nick Fuentes will someday pay off. In any case, the dominant religious forces among the right are not eugenicists, but Alex Jones and Pope Francis. The left, by contrast, supports all the policies which allow for a return to historically normal population trend, where the lower classes are gradually replaced.

It sure is zany that JD Vance follows some whacky memesters on Twitter, but I base my political affinity on reality rather than performative aspiration. Politics is about compromises. There is a place for idealism, but I save my idealism for philosophical and metaphysical speculations.

choose your fringe!

The right and left are increasingly defined by extremely small, mentally ill, squeaky wheels at the fringes. While the left has transgender surgeries for children, the right has multi-racial white nationalism.

Mothers who choose to chemically castrate their children have the right to do so. This is more likely to happen among mentally ill families than healthy ones. I have no interest in “saving” the children of mentally ill women. Freedom is self-corrective. In this sense, I can tolerate a coalition with Vivian Jenna Wilson. At best, these sorts of people function as a eunuch class. At worst, they are yet another dependent class to add to the list (albeit an extremely small and highly intelligent one).

Most LGBTQ people are politically conformist and are happy to support “the current thing.” As someone who is invested in the political stability of the country, I have no problem with eunuchs running around on Grindr, so long as they don’t actively sympathize with our foreign enemies and try to blow up our federal buildings. That’s more a problem on the right, not the left.

On the other hand, I have no place in a right wing defined by white nationalism at the fringes. It is easy enough to declare it to be “axiomatically immoral” and be done with it. White nationalists are a hodgepodge as diverse as any other fake identity group, like otherkin and Afrocentrists. Some of them are capable of a civil discussion, others view me as having some mystical Jewish uncleanliness that will infect them if they speak with me. Their goal is to alienate Jews from the right, and I am willing to let them win on that issue.

The worst of them believe that “mere whiteness” is a historically tenable identity; that the cultural distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and Germans are irrelevant; that the religious distinctions between Episcopalians and Baptists is meaningless; that all 800 million white people on planet earth are part of one big happy family with biologically determined interests, and it is only the Jews who have conspired to keep them apart. Prior to Jews, whites lived in a Garden of Eden, never engaging in warfare against each other, hugging and kissing in harmony.

Due to polarization at the fringes, I think that white nationalism is the logical conclusion of right wing ideas. This is a dead end, a cargo cult, wishful thinking, and resentment without construction. I try to be sympathetic to the causes behind it: Civil Rights, the collapse of religion, and the loss of identity. I try to understand it, but I ultimately reject it.

The left has its own problems. The best way to solve those problems is to think creatively about how to change things from within a system. That’s the purpose of “deep left.”'

technology.

I am hopeful that technology can shake up some of the most perverse lies and dogmas that weigh down our civilization. We spend an incredible amount of money on the bottom 60% of the population which pays no taxes at all. This population, uneducated, lazy, or senile, is growing. Because this growing class of dependents can vote, democracy incentivizes unlimited parasitism.

It is the right which prohibits abortion. It is the right which protests against embryo selection, IVF, and euthanasia. It is the right now which is pushing for “pro-family policies,” housing subsidies, natalism, and population growth. It objects to immigration on the grounds that “without immigration, housing would be cheaper, and the working class could have more kids!” This is replacing one problem with another.

It is the right which believes that women should be forced to be married at age 16 to any loser, as long as he’s Catholic. The right shames and ridicules any woman who chooses not to have children, calling her worthless (and worse). The effect of this is that women who are easily pressured by mobs of idiots have more kids than the ones who are less responsive to bullying. That is not a selective pressure I wish to promote.

historical context.

There are three time periods to examine:

1. The left prior to Marx;

2. The left between Marx and the fall of the Soviet Union;

3. The contemporary “neo-liberal” left.

The left prior to Marx is filled with luminaries and revolutionaries, whether one considers Zoroaster, Plato, Christ, Caesar, William of Ockham, Machiavelli, Voltaire, or Napoleon. As time goes on, the right wing has come to view each of these figures as “traditional,” simply due to the passage of time and the normalization of their thoughts, which were originally revolutionary.

The period between Marx and the Soviet collapse is less “enlightening,” and defined by an increasingly fanatical worship of the third world.

Somehow, in the absence of the Soviet Union, the right-wing has filled the moral void left by the left, and now worships Russia, China, and Palestine. It praises African Catholics as “based homophobes” and calls for “white sharia.” This is not something I identify with.

the future.

The left does have a problem with immigration. However, Trump brought in more immigrants per year, on average, than Obama. Bush was worse than Clinton. Reagan was worse than Carter. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you vote right or left — both parties are committed to immigration. There is no empirical evidence that the party of Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Usha Vance, or Amber Rose is going to roll back immigration any time soon. If anything, they are going to staple green cards to diplomas, which is much more culturally destabilizing than Spanish-speaking farm workers.

There is hope on the left. Governor Newsom is fighting vagrancy. Kamala is committed to border security. Smart people can join the Democrat Party and make it better. By contrast, the Republicans are a cult of Qanon, January 6th, conspiracy theories, and anti-intellectualism.

I’m not saying that the left is perfect, but that it is the lesser of two evils.

The right-wing criticizes its own side by saying, “Trump just doesn’t go far enough!” They wish he was crazier, more violent, more extreme, less compromising, and more committed. My criticism of the left is that it is too beholden to mentally ill ideologues. Neither of these situations is going to change quickly (if at all). Trump is never going to become sane and restrict immigration, and the left is never going to get rid of the pronouns. These are the realities of living in a fallen world. Choose your poison. I’ve chosen mine.

The sins of the right are catastrophic: destroy democracy, abandon the world, race war, Qanon. It’s accelerationism. The sins of the left are “slow burning.” Yes, eventually there is a point where immigration, senility, and equality becomes catastrophic. The right prefers to burn down the White House rather than see America turn into Brazil. For my part, I prefer Brazil to civil war.

More pathetically, I don’t think the right has the guts to do it. It’s all talk and no action. They do not have the courage of their convictions, which I despise. “Civil war” is the fantasy of downwardly mobile whites who have nothing to lose. These people have little agency beyond seething and shrieking. This is how I imagine the face of someone telling me I will be put in a gulag on the day of the revolution, or in a concentration camp on the day of the rope, or that I will go to hell on the day of judgment:

I don’t take these threats very seriously. It’s not very frightening. In my most sympathetic moments, I think of these people as children. But the rage of slave morality which animates these people is not just below the level of humanity, it is below the level of animals. Animals do not resent their betters.

There are leftists who have hissy-fits and freak out when you misgender them. But I would rather be forced to use xe/xir pronouns than see women forced to give birth, civil war, and imperial disengagement. Maybe Stalin would have put me in a gulag, but at least he wasn’t some petty-minded hobbit who believed in a “multi-polar world.” Expand or die.

There are some foreign wars which have been pretty stupid. Iraq and Afghanistan stand out, and even Vietnam. (If we’re keeping score, the left was right on both accounts, and the right was wrong.) Now that we are fighting a very sensible foreign war (defending Europe from a Chinese proxy), the right, all of a sudden, is pacifistic. This isn’t a good track record. It doesn’t seem to be getting any better. I don’t expect to be seduced into the “deep right” any time soon.

That said, I find civil debate entertaining. Occasionally my enemies on the right will prove me incorrect about something, which helps improve my ideas. Unlike most people who are afraid to have their ideas challenged, I enjoy speaking with people with whom I disagree. Many rightists are unable to understand this, and confuse my civility with secret agreement. Hope this clarifies.

Thanks for reading.

If you haven’t already, log-in to YouTube and show Alex some love for having me on.

1. Machiavelli died in 1527, ten years after Luther published his Ninety-five Theses, and Calvin would soon choose Switzerland as his base of operations to begin a new Protestant school of theology.

2. The geography of Switzerland probably gives it an unfair advantage in terms of stability, just as the twin oceans of America protect it from foreign incursions.

3. Rational does not mean correct; it means “in accordance with the facts as they are understood.” The Southern elite didn’t realize how effective Lincoln could be as a military leader, and assumed he would eventually give up.