"Weird" aesthetics over the decades: From unifying youth rebellion against authority, to anti-social warring against peers, as imperial collapse sets in

Although I like the '90s the least among decades I'm familiar with, they were still formative for me, and they're currently undergoing a revival (along with y2k), so I might as well chime in on some of the key features of that decade, and how they're different or similar to today's.

This recent reflection was sparked by Mumei singing "Basket Case" during her recent karaoke stream, instead of the 2000s emo era Green Day songs that are more popular nowadays. (Unless Zoomers get back into the '90s for real, and not just in clothing styles?)

Green Day has had one of the saddest trajectories of any musical group, regarding their role in the overall zeitgeist -- from purely (counter-)cultural actors back in the apathetic '90s, to the stirrings of the red state / blue state culture wars of the W. Bush 2000s, to full blown politicized witch-hunting of the woke 2010s and 2020.

Punk proved itself to be the most authoritarian-loving genre, with not only Green Day but the Offspring, the Dead Milkmen, Rage Against (now, For) the Machine, and worst of all the Dead Kennedys outright fangirling on Twitter with the CIA's anti-Trump electoral pointman McMullin. The common theme was that the half-or-more of the country that doesn't support your political program -- bailing out Wall Street, waging war against Cold War boogeymen, and mandating worthless vaccines for a bad flu -- are literal Nazis who must be concentration-camped in order to preserve freedom.

The only punk to pass this test with flying colors is Avril Lavigne, who never once posted anything political during the crucible of 2020 and after -- BLM, Antifa, boo Trump, vaccines, masks, etc. The princess of much-derided "mall punk" aced the test of anti-authoritarianism, while the critical darlings all failed pathetically. Score another W for all things mall-related.

As punk and "alt" culture in general became more authoritarian, its symbols went fully mainstream, to the point where you can walk into any drugstore and pick up hair dye in rainbow colors, Millennials are obligated to have tattoos, and marijuana is sold openly in every strip center around the country.

* * *

But enough about the recent past, which is all still fairly fresh in everyone's minds. The point here is to contrast how different the non-polarized '90s were. Hardly anyone had weird hair colors, tattoos and piercings other than in the ears were hard to find, and there were "3 strikes and you're out" laws about drugs and related crimes.

Now, someone who wasn't there might think that the relative normie-ness of the '90s meant that the alt culture was ignored, shunned, or suppressed by the majority of young people. But in fact they were fully accepted, even elevated at times. Just because you were a preppie or jock didn't mean you didn't have alt friends, didn't listen to gangsta rap or grunge, and never smoked a joint. Youth culture had its diverse sub-cultures, but they were all aware of each other and more or less friendly toward each other -- in their common struggle against The Man, The Powers That Be, The System, etc.

And far from that anti-authority sentiment being a vague vibe, it was explicit. White suburban alterna kids used to openly shout, "What smells like bacon?!" when the police were nearby. Preps didn't want to get hassled by The Man for smoking pot, joyriding, or whatever other mischief they were getting into. And being anti-police goes back even further among African-Americans. All this came together in the scene from Airheads -- where a metal band hijacks a radio station in order to play their demo tape for exposure -- in which the metalheads begin chanting, ROD-NEY KING! ROD-NEY KING! in order to get the crowd to swarm the bumbling cops.

This anti-authority attitude was not limited to local police, while praising the feds as witch-hunters against political enemies, as has become the norm over the past 5 years. Black leaders openly began talking about the role of the FBI in the MLK assassination, and the CIA for introducing crack into the ghettos. It was also the heyday for what the Deep State would brand as "conspiracy theories" among white people, too -- blaming the CIA for the JFK assassination (famously in the blockbuster Oliver Stone movie), the X-Files, the origins of Alex Jones, and so on and so forth.

* * *

To outwardly express these shared interests against authority, they adopted core elements of each other's aesthetics and style. Alterna kids flirted with dreadlocks (Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes, Dexter Holland of the Offspring), wore baggy jeans (including from Afrocentric brands like Cross Colors), and even if they were anti-sports, still sought out Charlotte Hornets gear by Starter. The preppy girls wore Doc Martens shoes. All white people adopted some degree of black slang.

The gangsta rap kids had as many drawers of plaid flannel as the grunge kids, and were bigger consumers of Tommy Hilfiger and Polo than even the preps. The '90s were the heyday of both the wigger and the... bleppy? Blunge? They weren't "Oreos" -- those were black kids trying to act WASP-y and yuppie in general, not just adopt the plaid flannels or Polo logo shirts from white kids.

The two counter-cultural camps -- alternative and gansta rap -- shared the pot leaf as a symbol (on hats, shirts, scrawled onto their textbook covers, etc., even if they never smoked a joint in their lives). In fact, they bought their counter-cultural clothing from the same store in the mall -- Spencer's.

Although I've never done any drugs, that didn't stop me from buying and occasionally wearing a black hat with a white skull in front, which had a vivid green pot leaf on its forehead. You couldn't buy that stuff at Abercrombie, Marshall's, or Walmart -- you had to go to Spencer's. That was before white counter-culture split off from black counter-culture and re-camped in the Hot Topic store, during the 2000s.

But back in the '90s, multiculturalism was the rule -- not only across races, but within white sub-cultures, like alterna and preppy, or alterna and country. The lineup for Woodstock '99 was heavy on the alterna sub-cultures within whites, but it also had George Clinton & the P-Funk All-Stars, James Brown, DMX, and Ice Cube. Not to mention multiple bands in the popular black-white fusion genre of rap-metal. Along with Willie Nelson, Creed, Sheryl Crow, and the Dave Matthews Band for normie / conservative-coded white audiences.

The shared interests against authority, and their cultural expression, came together in the censorship of music -- mainly by putting the sales-killing "Parental Advisory" label on the album cover. That effort was spearheaded by the non-partisan PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) back in the '80s, but continued into the '90s. And whereas the leader of the crusade, Democrat Tipper Gore, had earlier been the wife of a Senator, she was now the Second Lady.

There were also local measures across the nation to suppress counter-cultural symbols in public schools -- the pot leaf, the Charles Manson t-shirt popularized by Guns N' Roses frontman Axel Rose, piercings other than in the ear, and wild hair colors. But I'll cover those in a separate post, looking back on my own experience as a purple-haired 8th-grader in '95.

For now, suffice it to say that the role of those symbols was to unify the youth culture against the grown-up authorities. They were unifiers because they were already shared across a broad range of youth sub-cultures, and because the authorities were targeting their expression no matter who was displaying them. So it really was youth rebellion vs. power-tripping authorities.

This anti-censorship attitude meant to unify all of youth culture against the overbearing authorities, while still being non-partisan and indeed remarking on the political apathy of young people, was best expressed in the grunge anthem "Pretend We're Dead" by L7 from '92. (In the woke era, you'd have to add "all-female band", but that wasn't a rare thing before wokeness killed off the spirit of cooperation, including among women themselves.)

I didn't hear it at the time, but the jangly tambourine adds a nice Sixties counter-cultural touch, without being hamfisted or "boo Nixon" about it. Probably absorbed through the non-political Paisley Underground scene of the '80s, in their native SoCal area, which bore fuller fruit with fellow '90s icons Mazzy Star.

* * *

After over 200 years of rising, our empire's social cohesion (asabiya) had already hit a state of plateau by the 1980s and '90s, although it had not yet started its shallow decline, as it did during the blue state / red state culture wars of the 2000s, let alone the complete and total meltdown by the woke nadir of 2014-'20.

In the cultural domain of society, this breakdown manifested in the creative crowd -- whether the actual creators, their funders, their distributors / platformers, or the diehard consumers, or the commentators -- severing bonds with everyone who was not 100% identical to themselves. Obviously that unglued the whites from all non-white groups, since the creative crowd is overwhelmingly white. But it's not a racial thing, and pointing to 2000s emo and Hot Topic as a "whites-only" space is retardedly missing the bigger picture -- the creative crowd was severing itself from all other white cultures, like the preppies and normies and country fans.

Indeed, this dissolving of social bonds is so intense that even the alternative sub-cultures keep fragmenting into smaller groups, even though 100% of them are on the Democrat / liberal side of the political divide. They can't help but corrode the cohesion that would otherwise hold them together into a semi-big tent.

And as the creative crowd have abandoned their fight against overbearing authority, and turned on their fellow citizens instead, the overt and Deep State at the highest levels have come out in favor of them, and they in favor of it. Neither the FBI nor the local school principal will suppress a woketard student from sporting green hair, a lip piercing, pot leaf on their hat, etc.

Both the woketards and the authorities have discovered a common interest -- suppressing the unruly rabble during a crisis of legitimacy for the central authorities and elites in general, especially after the 2008 depression from which we have never recovered. The woketards because they feel they're superior to normies, who must be humiliated for their heretical culture. And the Deep State as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy against a would-be organized populace.

The central theme of anarchy has been re-branded for this new alliance, exemplified by the Black Bloc of the early 2000s anti-globalization movement being re-worked into a woketard paramilitary of the Deep State, now branded as Antifa. Whereas before it meant anti-authoritarian, now it means dissolving all social-cultural bonds for the woketards (to purify the culture of heresy), and preventing higher-level organization among the rabble in the eyes of the central state's security apparatus. Chaos, confusion, every man for himself, pure and total social breakdown -- not the put-upon banding together against The Powers That Be. In the new configuration, organization and teamwork = fascism, hence if you're anti-fascist, you're committed to dissolving every social unit in society.

And yes, that includes their own political team's units -- not the bizarre notion from right-wingers that the Dems or libtards or the Deep State have a well-oiled machine dominating a fractured GOP / conservatard enemy. The Democrats could not even produce enough cohesion to nominate Biden and Harris legitimately in 2020 -- the party leaders shut down the primary when it was clear nobody wanted Biden and would stay mired in a Bernie vs. not-Bernie civil war through the convention, like their 2016 convention on steroids (when Bernie representatives were boo-ing their "fellow" Dems from the convention floor!).

Every institution in the American Empire is coming apart at the seams, even the libtard ones. Hollywood can't make new movies, TV series, or music anymore. The video game industry can't do anything more than what they did 10 years ago, as Minecraft and GTA V are the most popular "new" games. The premier streaming platform, Twitch, is currently melting down from within. The general public does not believe the media, nor "peer-reviewed research" from the universities. The finance sector is collapsing again, with double-digit inflation on top of the problems of 2008.

Sure, there's an oasis here or there in every institution, but the overall trend is one of anti-social greed rotting them out from the inside, until they ultimately collapse. This is the opposite world of the Mid-20th Century, when people trusted the news & "studies," when the military could still win a world war, the FBI could coup a sitting president from the shadows with no one the wiser, when cultural production was still flourishing, when our manufacturing was first in the world, and when we didn't have rolling finance collapses with double-digit inflation and 0% interest rates and infinite money-printing.

*That* was the world of well-oiled machines -- here and now, we are in unrestrained breakdown and chaos, on all sides at once.

* * *

Contrary to clueless right-wingers who say that the creative crowd were always this bad, or always had this goal in mind, or are only now taking the mask off, this is in fact a 180-degree corruption of who they were in the '90s. And they themselves are openly embarrassed and ashamed of who they were back then, confessing their sins, promising to atone and "do better", and in all other ways disowning their previous selves. That's the opposite of celebrating their '90s selves as the tip of the spear, Trojan Horse, initial seed, Patient Zero, cuckoo's egg, long march through the institutions, or whatever other dum-dum metaphors the right-wing cultural commentators use to describe it.

Nor can we lazily say that they're the same as who they were back then because "the '90s led to the 2010s" -- sure, and so did the '50s, and the 1770s. We've gone through various phases of having little cohesion, rising, plateau-ing, then declining, yet to reach a new minimum. As far as cultural cohesion goes, the '90s were in a qualitatively different phase of this multi-century cycle. It was the multicultural consolidation of all our empire's earlier conquests, as well as unifying the sub-cultures within the imperial natives. The End of History -- no further left to go, unless history turns out to be non-linear...

Anyone likening the multicultural Nineties to the woke 2010s is from outer space -- they're totally out-of-touch with America, at least, and might as well be foreigners.

Next up: my 8th-grade battle for purple hair -- waged not against my normie peers (or even my parents), but against the literal authorities of the school. And other episodes involving my friends wearing the Charles Manson shirt, etc. I'll also elaborate on some other themes that I didn't get to chance to here, like individual vs. collective identity.

Millennials and Zoomers won't believe it, but that's because only Gen X and Boomers remember the reality of the '90s. Millennials and Zoomers retroactively insert way too much of the their own formative years in the 2000s and 2010s, back into the '90s or '80s, when it was not only absent, but often the polar opposite of the environment they imprinted on.

Streaming, the last format exciting enough to attract paparazzi, in contrast to podcasting

I keep saying it, but if you're not tuning into the streamer-verse, you're missing out on the only thriving and dynamic format of entertainment these days.

How dynamic and buzzworthy is it? It's the only place where the paparazzi still thrive -- AKA the clippers. If the individuals, and their entire scene, were not in demand by the general public, the paparazzi would get no money or status by covering them.

Literally no one consumes the output of the paparazzi who cover Hollywood movies, TV, sports, or video games. E!, Us Weekly, TMZ, and Blind Gossip, have fallen off from 10-15 years ago -- not because of anything they did wrong, but because the people / scenes they cover have fallen off from the public's fascination.

It's only the streamers -- some of whom play video games, some of whom are in other genres of streaming -- who generate such an organic amount of buzz, that a form of paparazzi can strike it rich (monetarily, or at least in clout) by covering them and providing snapshots to the audience, who don't have enough time to follow everything that every streamer does.

It's progressed to the point where there's internal debate about the value of clippers, akin to the Midcentury portrayal of the paparazzi covering movie celebs (like La Dolce Vita). Are they good, bad, annoying, helpful, leave them alone, chase them away, etc.? But they're thriving enough as a part of the entire ecosystem of streaming, just as the paparazzi were in the Hollywood celeb ecosystem back then.

There are even "weekly / monthly re-caps" of streamers in a certain genre, like Vtubers, or just Hololive English, that are regularly posted by a number of compilation channels on YouTube. It reminds me exactly of Talk Soup on the E! channel back in the '90s and 2000s, which took clips from a variety of talk shows during the week, and added a quick witty comment afterward, similar to the clippers zooming in on the streamer's face during a really funny line of dialog, maybe adding a text comment of their own on top of the visual.

What other form of entertainment generates a weekly review of the primary content, for the audience who can't keep up with everything -- and where this secondary content is considered entertaining in its own right, like Talk Soup back in the day? It's the clippers, "This month in Hololive-EN" YouTube compilations, the clearinghouse subreddit of LivestreamFail, and so on, all covering streamers.

Way back when, there were movie stars, then scripted TV stars, then reality TV stars, and now -- streaming stars. I don't think that risks inflating their egos, they already know what their follower counts and monthly incomes look like, how much of an entire ecosystem there is that is centered around their primary content, etc.

And as for the female streamers, they're the only thing close to an It Girl these days, whether they show their face or use a moving anime girl avatar.

* * *

Just to demonstrate that this is not merely a change away from IRL mass media, like movies in theaters, to online sub-cultural media, consider the other huge format to come out of the info-economy / entirely-online era -- podcasting.

Nobody clips podcasts and maintains a channel of their own for these clips, there are no weekly / monthly compilations, and there is no single clearinghouse subreddit about the podcasting format. And even if someone tried to do so, it would not be considered entertaining in its own right. The only reason people would clip podcasts would be to wage informational warfare against the hosts and their audience, to dunk on the other team, etc.

Generally, though, the info-warriors stick to screenshotting / quote-tweeting their enemies' tweets, rather than clip their podcasts. Twitter is their primary platform, and the podcasts are an appendage of that platform. Podcast content is a peripheral, not central, form of content in their take-meister / discourse ecosystem.

That doesn't mean it's less thought-out, or shorter-form -- quite the opposite. It's longer-form, and more structured than their tweets. But it's more of a side-hustle or passion project, and their full-time role is arguing on Twitter.

That is the opposite of the streamers, who generally post little at all on Twitter or any other textual platform, other than notices about upcoming streams. Streamers have more followers on their streaming platform than on Twitter, whereas the podcasters have more followers on Twitter than on their podcasting platform of choice.

To reiterate, people don't clip podcasts because they're not the real, primary content that grabs the audience's attention. It's posting on Twitter that is most relevant.

Still, aren't screenshotters like the paparazzi? No, because they're all highly partisan, screenshotting their enemies in order to dunk on them. Paparazzi were simply chasing the popularity, and didn't care one way or another about their subjects. Hate them or love them, taking a killer picture of them could earn you big bucks from a publisher, and perhaps fame if you did it long enough.

That is how the clippers of streams behave toward their subject -- whether you think this particular incident was based or cringe, you know it could do huge numbers, and you could monetize that as a nice little gig. Maybe even get famous in your own right if you stick to it enough. It's not primarily a bunch of bitter jealous haters clipping a stream in order to dunk on their sworn enemies.

* * *

Probably this has to do with the difference between media and entertainment, where media is far more ideological, and entertainment less so. You can make fairly ideology-free art and entertainment, but ideology-free media / reporting is a lot rarer.

Entertainment exists in its own space, although it may get conscripted into a political war. But the media, academia, and the "knowledge economy" are far more politically charged from the get-go, since their whole role is to justify and rationalize what is going on at the elite level. Entertainment is just to entertain.

Speaking of which, I notice that the streamers have lower education levels than their counterparts in the media or academia or knowledge economy sector. Not that they're less intelligent, they just didn't get sucked into the higher ed bubble as far as the media strivers did. Maybe they only did high school, or took some college but started streaming full-time instead of graduating. Or graduated but did streaming instead of grad / professional school.

Another way that they are the ones who are most similar to the Hollywood celebs from an earlier era. You didn't have to have a professional degree to star in Hollywood movies, let alone was there a premium for going to an Ivy League school. Your job did not involve propaganda, so you didn't have to be so thoroughly familiar with the ideology of the ruling elite -- what to promote, what to discourage, what to refrain from mentioning entirely. Just be entertaining, and that's it.

* * *

Where else might there arise a paparazzi role to cover the primary content? TikTok. That's entertainment, not media, and fairly ideology-free. (Reminder to Twitter-tards: everything you see from TikTok comes not directly from TikTok, a site / platform you never use, but mediated through cherry-picked examples by rage-baiters from your own platform, e.g. Libs of TikTok.)

But it's pretty short-form stuff, and so heavily visual and musical. There's not much to clip -- the entire original content is already of clip length. I see TikTok as providing the next models, rather than movie / TV stars who had to play characters in a narrative. There's no narrative or character history on TikTok. It's impressionistic, lifestyle vignettes, and lacking backstory or lore -- personas that are mysterious and alluring.

Models rarely figured into the paparazzi activities, unless a photographer followed one around IRL. You couldn't just source some clips from TV shows, stitch them together, and comment on them, like Talk Soup. The content that the models were a part of, was an ad campaign or runway show that you could take in all at once, in already public spaces, like billboards. You didn't need a middleman to "curate" a bunch of the models' content in one convenient place.

Aside from a very small number of supermodels, the model never reached the same level of celeb status as the actresses or singers (who were also playing characters whose brand and personal life could evolve in narrative form).

That's not to downplay TikTok or models -- I've written for awhile about the death of models, how actresses and singers have taken their place, and I wish they would come back. Hopefully TikTok can do that, but there are way too many vying for what must necessarily be a small number of slots at the top level. Others could continue doing it for fun, as a hobby, of course.

But there would still have to be curators, gatekeepers, or tastemakers -- like whoever casted the American Apparel models back in the good ol' days, or the cover girls for glossy magazines before that. And so far, the only kind of curators I see are the innumerable "TikTok compilation channel" operators, who put literally anyone in their re-uploads to YouTube. They don't have the eye for it.

It seems like each major brand would have to have its own TikTok account, which would feature models from TikTok (whether they were aspiring amateurs, or just lucky one-timers), wearing the brand's clothes. Like, if L.A. Apparel (the successor to American) had its own account, and you followed their feed in order to see who their casting directors had selected, out of the however-many-zillions of babes on the platform.

Or whoever the top alt-girl clothing brands are, more appropriately for TikTok.

Or Brandy Melville, also very appropriately for TikTok, which is not all e-girls, but has tons of normies who still want a fashionable edge to their everyday look.

Anything would be better than the garden-variety TikTok re-uploader on YouTube, encrusted with ads, "remember to subscribe" garbage, and the like. It has to be a showcase, of good taste, with no appeals to do anything -- it's already understood where to go get the things being modeled, or where to look that up elsewhere.

To wrap up where we started, that is another huge benefit of the streaming format -- they never waste their breath annoying you with those reminders to subscribe, smash that like button, comment down below, click the bell to get notifications, bla bla bla, like we slept through all of the 2010s and don't know how to use a social media site.

It's just not huckster-y -- and they make tons more money than the hucksters anyway! Or maybe, because of the lowkey nature of their salesmanship. The streamers do read the names and messages from people who leave a donation, but those dono's are not required to watch the stream, so it's more like a list of acknowledgements or credits in a book, movie, etc. "Produced with the generous support of the following people and institutions..." It's not salesman stuff.

I'd better stop there, though, before I get into the business models of streamers vs. podcasters. But briefly, it looks like you should make most or all of your content free, and aim for a contract with an employer / agency willing to hire you, or lacking that, get donations from fans who want to express their fandom and desire to be a benefactor -- not as the price of admission for every audience member.

On the non-role of social media in imperial collapse, whether its cultural or political symptoms

I wrote an in-depth thread responding to Jonathan Haidt's new article in The Atlantic about social media's purportedly crucial role in the political unraveling of the past 10 years. That's tech-determinism, which I have always rejected. It's about imperial rise and collapse instead. I elaborate why in that wide-ranging thread. Would you expect any less from here?

Also, would you expect a proper standalone post to treat such a topic? Of course not, especially if it's react content that I have already discussed earlier. That stuff belongs in a long series of comments to a totally unrelated post about rhythm, dance, and female singer-songwriters from the early 2000s. :)

But since I know some of you weirdos won't read it unless it's in a post of its own, I'll at least link to it, beginning with the comment here and on. Add any comments to this post, not the original one.

Age of Empires is over in Europe, until long-term mass invasion (no WWI, Huns, Tsar, etc., and no more renaissances)

After Russia has begun to reclaim the Ukrainian lands of its former territory, and with news that Germany may begin to re-arm itself, hot-take-havers on both sides have begun to fantasize about the return of the Age of Empires in Europe. Russia is going to fill out its former Tsarist / Soviet borders, Germany will become the neo-Prussians threatening all of Europe, perhaps coming to another clash over Eastern Europe, and so on and so forth.

This is all total fantasy, stemming from the media -- including social media -- being primarily based on emotional tribalistic reactions, emotional management (soothing a loss, or hyping up the team for a win), and other group activities divorced from factual analysis, historical knowledge, and the like.

What follows is a whole bunch of posts in one place. Should last awhile, but if anything else occurs to me, I'll add more posts in the comments section.

* * *

The blogosphere ecosystem was host to both forms of online discourse, but it turns out most of it -- both the suppliers and the demanders -- was proto-social-media. Once Twitter et al became viable platforms, 90% of the blogosphere creators and commenters abandoned their academic or analytical "brethren," and the results are plain to see. Utterly clueless fantasies spun by all sides, for the emotional management of their team within a broader societal battle. At worst, see-through propaganda; at best, info-tainment for LARP-ers.

The reason I keep driving home the model of ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis, as popularized by Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War, is that it helps clarify not only some piece of the past that was not already covered by the model, but the present situation as well. Without a proper long-term perspective, you are helpless to make sense of what's going on now and is likely to unfold in the near-to-medium future.

So, will the current situation in Ukraine lead to the formation of new expansionist states -- empires? Well, what causes a people to cohere so powerfully that they not only fend off invaders, but begin and sustain expansions of their own? It is finding themselves at the meta-ethnic frontier between themselves and a highly different Other, one that is an expanding state in its own right. If they are quickly taken over, due to lying close to the core of the expanding state, that doesn't allow them enough time to feel the effects of the frontier. They are rapidly made into subjects, and adapt accordingly. However, if they are pressed up against for a long time, that forces them to view themselves in strong Us vs. Them terms, and to have the time and resources to organize themselves accordingly, without becoming quickly dominated by the expanding Other.

When this external pressure eases up, the response from the newly cohesive society does not immediately go away. There is hysteresis, where the response lasts for a long time after the initial catalyst has gone away. The logic is that the catalyst could re-assert itself after a lull or temporary setback -- so, best to keep your response active, even if idling, until the catalyst has been absent for a very long time.

Still, at some point the initial reason for your large-scale cohesion and expansion has gone away for a long time, and the empire finds itself losing cohesion, unable to expand further, and then outright contracting and falling apart. This also shows long-term effects, where they cannot immediately form a new expanding empire even if some new group of invaders poses a new meta-ethnic frontier for them. Rather, they will simply be over-run by the new invaders during imperial decline.

This model contradicts the progressive view of history, where everything goes in a new direction with no possible cycles to unwind the progress. It also contradicts the spergy models of cycles, where responses are rapid and frictionless and not prone to long-term momentum, allowing for efficiency, optimization, and other sorts of Homo Economicus behavior. Nevertheless, that's how history works. It is not "irrational" or "sub-optimal" -- it simply is doing the best it can do, and if it produces bad side-effects or falls short of some utopian ideal, then so be it. Real life is marked by uncertainty and variance at large orders of magnitude, and that is why processes with hysteresis are adaptive -- they keep you the individual, or the society, from being caught off-guard by a temporary lull or fluke, and instead keep things going for a long while just to be certain.

* * *

What is the invading force that has thrown a long-term meta-ethnic frontier upon Western Europe any time recently? The answer is: none. The US empire helped to defeat one moribund empire in Europe -- Germany -- but the other moribund empires were on their way out the door as well. America simply swept up what was falling apart: the empires of Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Ottoman, and Spanish (and the unified Italy, which was still not an empire). The only empire to escape incorporation into the expanding American empire was Russia, which like the US was still expanding or about to reach its maximum extent during the mid-20th C.

If the Russian empire had been losing its territorial gains throughout the 19th C., as were the Spanish and Ottoman empires, or had already maxed out its gains and would begin losing them to, e.g., decolonization after WWI -- as was the case for the British, French, German, and Austrian empires -- then it, too, would have been in a wobbly state after WWII, and almost surely would have been folded up into the American empire as well. But Russian expansion didn't hit the wall until several decades later, beginning with their invasion of Afghanistan circa the 1980s, when their state was already starting to come apart, and would ultimately break down entirely during the '90s.

Luckily for the Russians, however, the American empire could not scoop up the collapsing Russian / Soviet empire, because America's expansion had already hit its own wall, beginning right after WWII. The Philippines -- won by defeating Spain in 1898 -- declared independence with zero pushback from America. Our invasion of northern Korea failed to place it under our control. Cuba (the other big prize from 1898) declared independence in the late '50s, and we have never recovered it despite massive pushback from Washington. Then there were the string of failed Asian land wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. All our Latin American proxies were defeated by nationalists by the late '80s and afterwards. Iran overthrew the American puppet and has never been under our sphere of influence since the '80s. Nor has Iraq, despite decades of pressure. Afghanistan was never under US control, and the Taliban recently kicked us out altogether. Ditto for our attempts to control Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and other former and future members of an Axis of Evil.

If we couldn't even scoop up a minor Central American country like Nicaragua, in our own backyard, what chance did we have of scooping up the former Russian empire, on the other side of the world?

Our failure to expand by force is not contradicted by the growth of NATO after WWII. After all, most of the core were added right away. The additions that would actually pose a threat to Russia -- in Eastern Europe -- were not added until 1999 and later. We did not conquer the new NATO members by force, as we had Germany during WWII. Both parties voluntarily agreed to an alliance, which is not territorial expansion by force. It's more accurate to call these new NATO members "tributary states" or something, not proper members of the American empire like Britain, France, and Germany.

And sure enough, America is not about to lift a finger to militarily defend Eastern Europe, nor will it allow its tributary states of the former Warsaw Pact use their own militaries to enter a war against Russia. Rather than being an all-powerful unified front, NATO has revealed itself to be weak, unwilling to counter Russian expansion, and barely held together. This is not a demand for it to magically will itself into an all-powerful status, just an objective assessment of its impotence, lack of cohesion, and absence of enthusiasm to fulfill its stated purpose. It could not have turned out any other way, since it is the vehicle in Europe of the American empire, which has been stagnant or outright declining as an empire since its peak during WWII.

Maybe if the Soviets had invaded and occupied England by surprise in 1950, we and NATO would have gone to war over it. But Russia invading Ukraine in 2022? No shot, bucko.

So much for the idea that America's NATO presence would present a meta-ethnic frontier in Europe, to force some of them into newly expanding states to counter America. Then there's the matter of the duration of time -- NATO has only been around for 70-odd years, and in Eastern Europe for scarcely 20. That's not enough time to produce imperiogenetic effects, and its duration is not going to last much longer anyway. With the failure to unite and counter Russia in 2022, it is de facto over as a threat to any nation in Europe, whether Eastern or Western.

* * *

That only leaves Russia as the potential source for causing imperiogenesis in other nations in Europe. But the Russian empire has been contracting since circa 1990, and is not anywhere near clawing back its losses in the Central Asian Turkic lands, let alone the former possessions of the Lithuanian empire (in its Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth incarnation), or of the Austrian empire (except for Lvov in Western Ukraine, as seems likely). Russia taking back Ukrainian land is merely recovering parts of Russia that broke off during imperial disintegration. It's no different than if Texas breaks off during American imperial decline, and some American strongman eventually recovers it for America, while failing to re-take more recent and far-flung possessions like South Korea and Japan after they eventually break off from our empire. See the previous post about Ukraine being integral to Russian ethnogenesis.

And no, contra some fantasies within the right-wing info-tainment sector, the large-scale influx of non-Europeans will not force any European nation to cohere more strongly, to repel them and begin expanding again. These immigrants are 99% slaves from nations conquered by Europe or America, and 1% brain-drain status-strivers, brought in by the will of the ruling Euro elites in both cases. Although they are highly different culturally, they are not unified amongst themselves, even remotely, as though they were a confederation of tribes choosing a single shared leader and advancing on targets in Europe.

In a few hundred years -- or maybe sooner -- they and their descendants will not be in Western Europe at all, just as the Eastern Mediterranean DNA signature in the Italian peninsula disappeared after Rome went through its Crisis of the Third Century, which ended it as an imperial power and attraction for slaves and status-strivers. Local elites will be even less unified than they are today, making the organization of a multi-national slave ring impossible. If you cannot organize your own local institutions effectively, you will be unable to organize more difficult enterprises, like multi-national ones. That means the end of Europeans conquering others through war, but also the end of Europeans importing slaves by the millions.

Slave importation is not a simple, unorganized "open the floodgates" operation -- it is a highly coordinated and networked enterprise, with multiple layers of administrative and bureaucratic structure. When the glue that holds these structures together starts to lose its strength, the institutions come undone, especially at the periphery of the empire where contraction begins, such as trafficking slaves from distant lands.

To take a more modern example, Constantinople had a massive non-Turkish population during the Ottoman era, especially drawing from Greeks and Armenians and Saharo-Arabian Muslims (and a smaller number of Bulgarians and Jews). These days, 100 years after the Ottoman empire collapsed, those groups are more or less absent compared to Turks. Istanbul has lost the attractive power of Constantinople under the Ottomans, as well as the administrative ability to incorporate a double-digit percentage of multi-national foreigners. (Only one longstanding non-Turkish group remains, the Kurds, and mostly in the rural east, far from the core of Istanbul.) That will not change, no matter how much anyone in Turkey may pine for the bygone days of their capital's ethnic heterogeneity. Cosmopolitan opulence, endless cheap labor, exotic sex slaves, and vibrant foreign cuisine -- crave it all you want, it's not coming back after your imperial heyday is over.

* * *

To wrap-up things up, let's take a clear-headed look at Europe on the eve of WWI, the period that is currently tickling the fantasies of the info-tainment sector. In case you guys forgot what you learned in high school history class (everything), remember the acronym "MANIA"? The causes leading to WWI -- Militarism, Alliances, Nationalism, Imperialism, Assassination.

The key one is imperialism, i.e. these were not mere countries or nations, but expanding empires, all pressing against each other, vying for the high-risk / high-reward game of war as an empire. If you're a little podunk nation of no consequence, you can't win that much in war, and you'll likely lose anyway. So why bother with a WWI-level war? Incursions, clan feuds, whatever. But not a continent-wide cataclysm like WWI.

The reason that war, and its aftershock of WWII, was so unique in European history is that Europe had never had so many expanding empires all jockeying for territory at the same time. There were no rival empires to the Romans when they were expanding in Europe (only to the east, like the Persians). Most of the Middle Ages saw only one empire in the West -- France. There was also a Muslim empire in Iberia, which however did not threaten anyone other than France. And in the east, there was the Avar khaganate, the Byzantine empire, the Bulgarian empire, and the Kievan Rus, by the close of the 1st millennium. None of which were threatening Western Europe. The various Turkic and Mongol empires never threatened Western Europe either. Nor did the Lithuanian empire (Grand Duchy) that arose during the late Middle Ages.

The empires of WWI all had Early Modern origins (Britain, France after the Hundred Years War, Prussia / Germany, Austria, and Russia), or perhaps the end of the Late Middle Ages (Spain and the Ottomans). These largely Early Modern empires arose as reactions to the expanding empires of the Middle Ages -- Spain against the Muslim empire, the Ottomans against the Byzantines, Russia against the Mongols and the Lithuanians, etc.

Since all of those Early Modern empires blew each other up during WWI and WWII, with Russia staggering through Midcentury, there are no more European empires jockeying for territory these days. And to reiterate the original point, there are no replacements for the forces that gave birth to those Early Modern empires -- no new Bulgarians, Mongols, Lithuanians, Carolingians, Capetians, or Emirate / Caliphate of Cordoba.

Empires do not "assume new, less military / territorial forms" -- they simply contract and collapse, unable to control other societies by force. German banks exploiting Greek workers through the EU system does not make Germany an empire, nor does the international vogue for French, Italian, and Spanish cuisine make them empires either. Their former expansions have been contracting ever since WWI or before, and that will not reverse for many centuries at the earliest (assuming a new threat appears long-term on their borders, after they have already hit rock bottom internally).

Let's consider the two specific cases that the info-tainers are obsessing over -- the Russians and the Germans.

Russian ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis are rooted primarily in the invasion of Turko-Mongol empires, all of whom have been pacified by the Russians (and the Chinese) for centuries. The Ottoman pressure to their south has been absent for a century. And the Lithuanian threat to their west has been a void as well. If anything, the American expansion into Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, has been an attempt to stimulate Russian expansion all over again, by reincarnating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth threat to Russia's wide-open western border. But the reality of NATO impotence in Eastern Europe is already rapidly becoming clear -- they're no Grand Duchy of Lithuania -- and the duration of the threat has only been around for 20 years, unlikely to last even a century. So, no, Russia will not reconquer Eastern Europe as they did under the Tsars.

German imperial origins are even shallower, beginning only during the 1600s (vs. the late 1400s for Muscovite / Russian expansion over their invaders). Most of the Germanic lands were a fragmented black hole of cooperation, left in the wake of the collapse of the Frankish empire during the Middle Ages, whether of the Carolingian apogee, or of the later Ottonian eastern rump kingdom. Both of those were finished by the late Middle Ages, and by that time the Holy Roman Empire was not expanding, and was not a centrally governed state.

Rather, German imperiogenesis came from the east, among the Prussians, who expanded westward to unify Germany. Sidebar: the Prussians were never a threat to Eastern Europe, which from the Early Modern period onward has always been under Russian control. And before that, it was the province of the Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Kievan Rus, and various Turkic and Mongol invaders. Viewing the Germans and Russians as some sort of eternal enemies is ignorance, owing mostly to the American fixation on WWII-themed info-tainment, one of the few times the two nations were locked in deadly battle.

In any case, the Prussians only began expanding during the 17th C., first by unifying with Brandenburg in eastern Germany, and then liberating themselves from being a fiefdom of Poland, culminating in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. Their formative experience was the expansion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on their borders, and there has been a void in that region ever since the contraction of the Russian / Soviet empire. So there will be no new Prussians. And since there is no new Britain or France on the western side of Germany, it's not as though the Rhinelanders are going to turn Germany into a new expansionist empire either.

Reality check: the only long-term source of empires in Western Europe has been France, whether the Gauls, the Franks, the Capetians, or the Bourbons. Ditto for the renaissances that coincide with imperial expansion -- not caused by the military expansion itself, but owing to a common source, namely the high degree of cohesion and cooperation, whereby the elites patronize unprofitable cultural production and culture-makers devote themselves to such unprofitable endeavors that may not even be realized within their own lifetimes, for the greater good of the whole people and nation.

So, the only nation to keep an eye on for the return to the Age of Empires in Europe is France. And just like the other former empires of the WWI era, they are dead and buried as an expanding force. There may be nationalist sentiment brewing, which will eventually allow them to recover their sovereignty from the American empire / NATO / EU, but that is not the same as intense solidarity coming from lying at a meta-ethnic frontier for centuries. Although breaking free from their American overlords, they would not become a newly expanding state against their neighbors.

Rather, the situation would look more like the Balkans, where in the wake of Ottoman and Austrian imperial collapse, none of the member nations can cohere strongly enough to expand against the others, notwithstanding a long-term regional power -- Serbia -- enjoying greater sovereignty than the others (who became vassals of the American empire). France will become the Serbia of Western Europe when the American empire collapses.

The political / military Balkanization of Western Europe will be accompanied by a new cultural Dark Age in Europe (and obviously in the imperial core of America). The original Dark Age spared France, which enjoyed the Carolingian Renaissance, and the later peak of Capetian culture under Louis IX. But that was back when France was an expanding empire, birthed by its status on the frontier with the Roman empire. No more Romans, no more Carolingians or Capetians. This time around, France too will fall under the Dark Age.

Westerners derisively ask what the Arabs have created, invented, or discovered since the late Middle Ages. Already, we can begin to ask that about ourselves, and the joke will only sound more mordant as time goes on and the reality becomes obvious.

The silver lining, though, is no more WWI or WWII-level cataclysms. We're going to adapt to sub-imperial status, where nobody cooperates on a massive scale, whether for militaristic expansion or for transcendent cultural production.

"Sub-cultures" now are just isolated individuals; their breakdown due to collapse in trust and in political order

I would've had no idea that college students had returned to campus over the past week, except for the fact that I suddenly started seeing a lot of alt-girls at the thrift stores again for the first time in awhile. That was confirmed going down the main drag through campus, where I hardly saw any such types over the summer.

This goes to show how fragmented society has become, when the most popular "sub-culture" cannot even sustain itself throughout the year, even in an urban environment. It crucially depends on a large group of student transplants piling in during the university school year.

This is the first time for such fragmentation, and is the complete opposite of earlier bona fide sub-cultures like punks, goths, '90s alternative, and scene kids. They were so ubiquitous they had names like "mall goth," and their music labeled "pop" punk -- they and their culture were unavoidable.

It's not just a youth thing, that's part of all sub-cultures. Why are they only visible during the university school year, as if there aren't tons of 18-22 year-olds in the city during the summer?

And why is it only that college-student age range? All earlier sub-cultures had high school members, and they don't go away during the summer. Yet I haven't seen high-school alt-girls for most of the year, and the ones I saw earlier may have actually been freshmen in college.

Ditto for the 20-somethings who are older than college kids. As if there were no 24 year-olds in the punk, goth, grunge, or scene scenes? They don't go away during the summer. Yet you don't see them taking part in sub-cultures either.

What's different about college students is that they're drawn from all over, and concentrated in one place. So all of these alt-girls who suddenly appeared as though they were a cohesive crowd, are actually just lone individuals from their small towns or more likely suburbs.

They're the one girl in the whole area code who's holding onto the practice of sub-cultural behavior. They have no one else in their organic, rooted environments to take part in the scene with, so they rely on moving to a college town to find others like them.

However, even there it doesn't take root as a community, since that would entail a sub-cultural presence in the post-college-kid demographic. But these things just don't exist outside of the college student population. So although they can find some like-minded individuals to hang out with during their college years, they realize that it isn't a real community, and they give up on it during their mid-to-late 20s. This is not merely "aging out" of a scene, which in all bona fide sub-cultures never happened until at least someone's 30s, and was mainly due to trying to get married and raise children.

Rather, the current pattern is due to a collapse in trust, where no one wants to join a collective anymore. You can dabble in being an alt-girl for a few years, but you don't grow close-knit to the other ones, so there's very little holding you all together once the college years are over. It has no social glue, and quickly falls apart. Also, there are no boys in the scene, so it does not support dating, courtship, and eventually pairing off. There can be no community without both sexes.

Really the only commonality among the alt-girls is outward presentation (clothing, hair, etc.). This gets the sub-cultural formation backwards -- the outward badges are supposed to come after an existing social bond has been formed, and it signals who belongs to that group. Now they form a group purely based on common fashion, but that does not require any social bond to exist. They're simply all fans of the same pop culture signals -- Doc Martens, Twin Peaks, center-parted hair, and so on.

If the alt-girls themselves are invisible outside of college towns during the school year, then their broader cultural presence is even more of a void. For bona fide sub-cultures, there were not only the mall goth people, but mall goth music, mall goth movies, and the like. Whether you knew it by name or not, you heard pop-punk and emo music all throughout the 2000s, including outside of the mall environments where they congregated.

In 2021, what music immediately comes to mind when you spot the rare alt-girl IRL? Oh, she must have posters of... who, exactly, on her wall? And she must listen to... what's-her-name? on a loop. Niche artists do not define a sub-culture, singly or collectively. Those are just copes for try-hards who belong to no sub-culture.

You didn't have to be a punk to have heard the Clash in the '70s, a goth to have heard the Cure in the '80s, a grunger to have heard Nirvana (or worn the signature flannel shirt) in the '90s, or a scene kid to have heard Fall Out Boy in the 2000s.

* * *

Looking back, it seems like the 2010s were already a period of stagnation for sub-cultures, likely caused by the fraying of trust in a stable society in the wake of the 2008 recession that most people never recovered from (unless you had a line of credit with the central bank, i.e. QE). The economy being blown up for good cannot have had any other outcome on trust in the system.

Still, there was the embryonic form of the alt-girl / e-girl / art ho by the late 2010s, who you could identify by the revival of baggy clothes, center-parted hair, sad-girl vibes, and Billie Eilish fandom (the last example of a sub-culture's icon who was widely known outside of the sub-culture itself, although throw in Benee's break-out hit "Supalonely" as well).

That stagnation carried over into 2020, when I remember seeing alt-girls all over the place, and viral videos from TikTok made by and about them. That took a nose-dive after the Democrats stole the 2020 election and installed Biden by late January. It's not due per se to whether the Democrats or Republicans hold office, but the deeper annihilation of trust that it caused. It was not an obscure political event either -- it began unfolding on election night itself, with the whole world paying attention, and continued for months until inauguration.

Belonging to a sub-culture requires a minimal amount of interpersonal trust and societal stability -- when it switches to anarchic naked power struggles, and every man for himself, then collectiveness is over, whether sub-cultural or normie.

The cold take is that sub-cultures require a strong political order because they need an authoritarian Other against which to rebel, a worthy fuckin' adversary in an anti-Establishment war. But you can rebel against The Man as an isolated individual, so this view does not explain the collective aspect of sub-cultures. And besides, several major sub-cultures were not against society writ large, as part of a politicized or anti-authoritarian counter-culture. Beatniks were more of a dropout sub-culture, not one that was confrontational to the centers of power. Ditto for metalheads, grunge, and emo / scene kids. They were instead defined against other cultural groups, i.e. normies.

They need a strong cohesive trusting society because in an anarchic individualist society, no collectives are possible, whether sub-cultural or normie. Actual sub-cultures knew this, overtly or intuitively, and did not try to blow up society -- they just wanted to assert their independence from or superiority over other cultural, not political, groups (the normies).

Now that the Democrats have blown up trust and cohesion at the highest levels by stealing elections in broad daylight, with no consequences afterward, that basic requirement for sub-cultures has evaporated rapidly since Biden took office.

That is just as visible -- or rather, invisible -- in the production of pop culture, which ground to a halt after inauguration. There's no new pop music in 2021, other than Olivia Rodrigo (and "Driver's License" came out while Trump was still president). The radio, retail stores, etc., refuse to play what little new music might be getting made, and will be stuck in the 2010s forever.

The breakdown of cultural production affects the would-be sub-cultures in another way -- since they define themselves against the normies, they have nothing to define themselves against when the normies themselves have no clear culture. It's not just sub-cultures that are breaking down, but cultural cohesion in general, including mainstream / normie culture.

So there's another pathway from the stolen election to collapsed sub-cultures: the destruction of institutional trust made it impossible to make new mainstream culture, which has deprived the would-be sub-cultures of the Other to define themselves against. From "no new pop music" to "no new sub-cultural music". Especially at the collective level -- I don't care if someone somewhere is making new music, if it isn't leading to the formation of new scenes, crowds, and collectives.

There is no way out of this downward spiral. The economy was blown up for good back in 2008, and the political order was destroyed in 2020. We're in for disintegration for most of this century, and that means the conditions for a strong, healthy, cohesive culture among normies are out the window -- and with that, the formation of sub-cultures as well. Every part of the culture is going to melt down into individual tastes consumed in isolation, perhaps re-branded and glorified as "kinks" in a coping attempt to sound sub-cultural.

The most we can do now to connect with others about culture is to try to preserve what has already been made, before the anarchy arrived, so that it can survive for distant future generations when the anarchy has receded. The Roman Dark Age was caused by a breakdown in their political order, and so will ours. Any cultural rebirth will likely take place outside the crumbling American Empire, in a newly expanding empire (none of which are on the horizon).

Central authorities continue unraveling: navigating a weak fragmented society

In an earlier post I showed how the weakness and instability of the elite position in the US today can be seen by comparing the attempted COVID-related coercion to the attempts of the 9/11-related measures by the Bush admin in the 2000s.

There was utter uniformity in the responses back then — not a single airport manager said, "Yeah, we're not gonna bother with that fake security theater shit, you can keep your shoes on and have your family and friends with you at the gate". And everyone followed those rules on the commoners' side as well.

Moreover, there was a high degree of conformity in the set of beliefs people had — did Saddam have WMD, did he pose a big threat to Americans, did he have anything to do with 9/11, etc. — and the types of responses they thought we ought to take — bomb to send a message, occupy with troops, etc.

Twenty years later, all of that former cohesion has gone out the window. The leaders and commoners of some of the most populous states defied the COVID hysteria consensus last year, and much of the others have joined them this year.

Shutdowns only continue where Democrats monopolize the sector, as in public education (while still, of course, drawing an income and benefits from the taxpayers). Masks lasted less than a year (and no, the fearmongering about the Delta variant has not caused normies to put them back on, nor have flyover state governors re-imposed a mask mandate). A small share of the "vaccine hesitant" actually gave in and got the jab, and there are no teams of NGO flunkies or the Army roaming around door-to-door giving the jab against the wishes of the hesitant. Vaccine passports are not happening, and will only be rolled out, if at all, in super-libtard cities like New York and San Francisco.

Aside from the failures on the material policy side, they haven't even managed to win the psychological war. A large share of the population thinks the whole thing is overblown, and will never think / feel / act as though it were a grave threat personally or collectively. People have less faith in "the experts" than ever, and as a result the capacity of institutions to use fearmongering to manipulate has evaporated. Psyops thrown together by the flunkies at the intel agencies have never been more impotent and embarrassing.

It is entirely irrelevant that some minority of the population has wholeheartedly adopted the suite of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that the experts have urged everyone to adopt. They are mindless midwit bootlickers, so it requires nothing from the authorities to make them get with the plan. Pushing an open door is no test of your strength — try pushing a door that is being steadfastly pushed from the other side, then the spectators will see how strong you really are.

Worse than merely being weak, our authorities are devoted to proving it over and over again, lest any doubt remain. They don't understand a simple law of transitivity — that if you fail at something easy, you will fail at something hard, so don't bother and find something better to do. And yet, having failed at getting everyone to wear masks indefinitely, they take on the even harder project of getting everyone vaccinated — and then having failed at that, they take on the still harder project of implementing vaccine passports nationwide.

And rather than these repeated failures representing bad luck or incompetence, they came from a far more unsettling source — defiance from those who they were presuming to coerce. They got their bluff called, and they couldn't do jackshit about it. Now everybody knows that the authorities have little to no power in coercing either the elites or the commoners into their harebrained scheme du jour.

Now they have revealed that they rely entirely on their targets already forming a diehard super-fandom for the Establishment — otherwise compliance will be spotty at best, since the elites and their institutions have torched their credibility for good-faith and benefit-of-the-doubt trust from the general public, or from their fellow elites for that matter (e.g. the governors of Florida and Texas).

In short, we live in the polar opposite of the authoritarian / totalitarian dystopia that both the left and right still believe is a looming menace. A state with strong authority is a dystopia to libertarians, and that's what 99% of the elites still are, and have been since the libertarian revolution of the late 1970s and the Reagan era that cemented it in the '80s.

But while that may have been a relevant stance from which to oppose the 9/11-related coercion under Bush, it is irrelevant and out-of-touch today, when national and international cohesion among the elites has collapsed. We have no strong state to fear, since it has never been weaker, as proven by the failures above on both the material and ideological levels. And make no mistake, that is where they have invested all of their efforts over the past year and a half — it's not some minor throwaway project that they fucked up on, but their drop-everything-else majorest of major priorities.

The trend for the near-to-medium term is societal disintegration from the top down. Imperial stagnation and now fragmenting outside our national borders has already begun. There will be no national authority, but there could be authority at the state level. Still, it will be more of a city-state, where authority applies more in the core city and not so much elsewhere. But some city-states will go one way, and others another way.

Even within a city, there will be smaller fiefdoms that go one way or another, with weak authority from the city government (let alone the state or national govs trying to enforce local outcomes). The Walmart fiefdom will allow you in without a vaccine passport (their greeters don't want to get killed in an angry stampede of Walmart shoppers), while the Whole Foods fiefdom will put more obstacles in the way (knowing their shoppers are more eager to comply). The restaurants in some neighborhoods will flout the city regulations about COVID, while others will try to enforce them.

It will make life more annoying at first, having to understand where you can and cannot go, given your preferences. But we'll get used to it. Even if one place switches sides, we'll react no more annoyed than if they had adopted a new type of background music ("I remember when this place used to be cool..."). It will be a total joke of a society compared to a decade or so ago, but that won't make the trends reverse, and we'll learn to adapt to a shittier way of life.

These days, the dystopia is libertarian. We don't have to plan for a way around an authoritarian society — we have to plan how to prevent or punish crimes on our own, since the police will be another institution to collapse in power (already under way, with soaring crime rates in the past year or so). We have to preserve culture ourselves, since the libraries, schools, and museums are busy emptying or outright destroying what they were entrusted with. And we'll have to figure out which specific places or fiefdoms will be favorable to us and those close to us, since uniformity is gone. Perhaps none will be favorable, and more will have to be done in-house, as it were.

The seemingly related trends of the 2010s will actually be of minimal help here, since those were all still very much in the rugged individualist framework of the Reagan revolution. How to eat right, lift right, fix a flat tire, prepare meals in a crockpot, and so on and so forth. That was all self-improvement and self-reliance, and as such it relied on a relatively stable set of institutions at the societal level.

Rugged individualism in an environment of collapsed authorities means the law of the jungle, and a quick death. With no large-scale institutions, the major task now is to build best-we-can-do replacements. And that takes social networks for recommendations and warnings, whether neighborhoods, communities, families, etc.

Paradoxically, and similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, indulging the self is only possible in a cohesive society, although such egotism wears away at the communal foundation that supports it. Self-improvement and actualization was for the Boomers who grew up during the full flower of the New Deal, which they progressively eroded during the Reagan era. Now that the institutions barely exist anymore, the post-Boomer generations cannot indulge in the self-improvement framework. I don't mean that (only) in a normative sense — just descriptively and mechanistically speaking, they are incapable of doing so even if they wanted to.

It's time to get better connected, or go under. Find out which fiefdoms are most favorable to you, now that central authority has collapsed.

Understanding elite over-production theory, beyond the take cycles of social media

Our beloved anti-woke left princess, Aimee Terese, and some fellow travelers on Twitter are arguing against "elite over-production theory".

The way that "discourse" works on social media is that -- it does not. I can't tell who she's referring to, or what they said, or what they cited, and her reactions are tweet threads rather than a structured post. Discourse did take place on blogs during the blogosphere's heyday, whereas very little in-depth discussion takes place on social media. This is not specific to Aimee or her opponents, it's the way that all "discourse" on social media works.

This post will not summarize the theory, but will correct / clarify some common misconceptions, as well as provide three links of increasing detail, to understand the model and the evidence behind it.

Please ignore whatever retards on social media you're getting your view of elite over-production theory from. At this point, it's one of the most historically grounded AND predictive models of societal destabilization, including the 2020 breakdown that Turchin predicted over a decade before the fact.

Does not matter if midwits are warping it (or you may be reading them uncharitably, I can't tell without specific names).

First, elite over-production is only one aspect of the model, Structural-Demographic Theory. The others are immiseration of the commoners, and strain on the finances of the state.

All are inter-related, e.g. as the elites make up a larger share of the population, they have stronger bargaining power over the labor supply, so they lower average wages. And since there are too many elite aspirants chasing too few available spots that would satisfy their striver ambitions, they increasingly plunder the state's resources to subsidize their striving and consumption contests.

None of it says "elites" are only those who are educated, or who are a part of the informational / left-wing sectors of society. In some empires like Rome and Prussia, the elites mainly took a military / right-wing route to the top. That just means the top-heaviness of their societies took the form of "too many officers, not enough footsoldiers".

Others were like ours, relying on (non-military) education, such as the early modern stage of British imperial expansion -- where there was an explosion in the enrollment numbers at Oxford in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In those days, they didn't have NGOs to absorb the over-produced aspirants, they tried to find an office in the church somewhere. But same principle.

In medieval Europe, you can count the numbers of peers (barons, knights, etc.), compare that to the total population size, and see how the share who were elites was either swelling or deflating.

Yes, elite ranks can and do get depopulated, on the other side of the cycle from their over-production phase. Maybe they kill each other off in intra-elite warfare (Hundred Years War, War of the Roses, and so on). Maybe the aspirants stop packing the enrollments of higher ed, and stay in their home region instead of packing into the super-elite metros, as happened during the New Deal era in America.

And maybe when there's an economic crisis that threatens to decimate the elites' numbers and levels of consumption, the state refuses to bail them all out, so the elite ranks remain depressed -- this was the response during the Great Depression, which was mainly a decapitation of the top-heavy Victorian / Edwardian / Roaring Twenties growth of the elites and strivers.

Here are three increasingly detailed links. No excuses for not understanding the theory, whether you're pro or anti.

Top Amazon review of Secular Cycles by Turchin & Nefedov, the central monograph of the theory.

Blog post at Turchin's own site, reviewing the model.

Download a PDF of Secular Cycles, if you don't have IRL library access to it. There's only one proper chapter on the model, it is mostly a series of historical case studies probing the strengths and weaknesses of the model (looking at Rome, England, France, and Russia).

If you want to buy a cheap physical book aimed at a lay audience, Turchin's War and Peace and War has discussions of all levels of cycles involved in societal growth and breakdown. Mainly it's about imperial expansion and contraction. But in the middle sections on "imperiopathosis," the Structural-Demographic Theory is presented, with historical data on the elites, commoners, and state finances.

So get reading, people. No Millennial excuses like "I have ADD".

Democrat polarization fails when they're still the opposition party of the Reagan era

The increasingly doomed attempt by Democrats to steal the elections of 4 states (WI, MI, PA, GA) should serve as a bitter reminder to those among their ranks who LARP as though it were still the '60s and '70s, when their party was dominant (New Deal) and they could shove a Republican president out of office (Nixon, Watergate).

Since the Reagan realignment of 1980, they have isolated themselves further from the rest of the country, alienated their potential swing voters, and put all their elite-sector eggs in the basket of unproductive informational activity, such as the media, Silicon Valley, higher ed, and the intel agencies of the Deep State. Finance is the sole productive member of their coalition.

Today's Democrats fantasize about being a dictatorial party that imposes its will despite being the party that nobody wants. To move beyond their delusions, they have to win over states, regions, demographic groups, and sectors of the economy, that currently hate their guts. No amount of rioting, burning down cities, rigging state elections, censorship of the internet and social media, and contemptuous portrayals in entertainment, is going to accomplish that.

Indeed, it's only broadened Trump's appeal: his base is still there, but now buttressed by less-than-hardcore fans, who are thinking, "Whatever he may or may not have delivered from his 2016 campaign themes, at least he isn't hell-bent on our total and remorseless annihilation." Democrats have lowered the bar of acceptable political activities so much, they've allowed Trump to clear the bar with voters all the more easily in 2020 than in 2016.

Any Democrats who want a future where their party is dominant, rather than opposition, now have a whole 'nother topic to have to counter-signal. First it was just, "I don't think flyover country is a basket of deplorables." Then it was, "I don't think burning down cities is an acceptable way to whip urban votes for our candidate." Now it is, "I don't think impotent opposition parties should try to steal the national election by rigging the vote in a few cities that they control."

As I've said before, it seems like finance is the only elite sector using the Democrat party as its vehicle, which has not pulled out all the stops to wipe out their political enemies, at the elite or popular level. The media is the most compromised, followed closely by info-tech, the informational wings of the Deep State (CIA, rather than the Pentagon), and education / campuses. Entertainment is surprisingly not as propagandistic and contemptuous as the others, but it has no material force in society -- only supplying or depriving people of mass-mediated culture.

With apparently no negative feedback from within those worst-offending sectors, the only check on their party's self-destruction is Wall Street and the central bank. They can tighten the financial screws on their fellow elite sectors of the Dem coalition -- a technically, if not politically, easy feat since Silicon Valley is entirely propped up by central bank money-printing that flows through the upper tiers of the finance pyramid (QE). That funds the tech cartel members directly through investments in them, as well as indirectly via the disposable income that their yuppie customer base spends on their products and services. (Yuppies would have had zero wealth growth since 2008 if not for QE trickling down to the top 20%.)

But since finance has actual material power over society -- the creation and flow of money, not just shaping consensus, mass communications, crafting narratives, and other airy-fairy crap -- perhaps they should split off and form their own party. Let the Democrat brand belong to, and die with, the most bitterly despised sectors of society -- Silicon Valley, the CIA, the media, and college campuses. Bring along Hollywood and entertainment, though, since their domain of monopoly (pop culture) is still fairly popular across demographic and political groups, even if it's not powerful.

Then convince the industrial commodity sector -- steel especially -- to defect from the GOP. Manufacturing controls the GOP and has destroyed domestic demand for industrial commodities by off-shoring the factories that make finished goods from raw materials. Finance has a material interest in re-industrializing domestically, since de-industrialization has saddled the central bank with all the costs of funding society (these debts have now bankrupted the central bank), rather than taxing the high-profit-margin manufacturing sector and its labor-intensive workforce that earned high wages. That will lock in Pennsylvania for this new party, along with Indiana (the #1 steel-producing state).

The marketing and branding is irrelevant for now. The key point is just to shed the branding -- and the coalitional membership -- of those hated, impotent, and unproductive sectors that are currently destroying the Democrat party. Call the new one the "Funding and Building Party," I don't know. Things need to be Made in America again, at an industrial scale, and that requires funding their operations, and providing the raw materials for manufacturing. "Funding" avoids the bad associations with "financing" and "banking". Or the "Investing in American Creation Party," which sends out good vibes to fans of Made in America manufacturing, cultural creativeness, and more distantly Creationist-friendly religious people.

Which groups are most dissimulating about Trump support, and which DGAF about elite media pressure?

Part 1 and part 2 on the brokenness of the polls in predicting the outcome of the upcoming election. Now we'll look inside the cross-tabs of the IBD poll to see who feels the strongest pressure to appease the elite media inquisitors by responding "don't know," "third party," or "Biden," when in fact they're voting Trump. We'll also see who feels the weakest pressure to disguise their voting intention.

Supposedly, Trump is trailing among so many groups, perhaps doing worse than last time among some (like whites). It's easier to look at which groups show an increase in support, compared to the 2016 exit polls. They are most definitely not hiding their support, if it's even greater than during the last election. Dissimulation is only compatible with falling support in poll responses.

Trump is winning those with only high school education by 60-38, widening his lead from last time of 51-46. Among those making less than $30K in income, he's losing 44-50, but that's only half the gap from last time, 40-53, and light-years beyond what you'd expect for a Republican in the Reagan era. He's losing urban residents 36-59, but that too is a small improvement over losing them 34-60 last time. And he's losing Hispanics 39-54, but that's dramatically better than losing them 28-66 last time.

All it took for the GOP to win nearly half the Hispanic vote was a nuclear neg from the presidential nominee -- calling them murderers, rapists, and drug dealers, and threatening them with deportation. "Ey mang, I ain't no bad guy, I'm a good guy, let me prove it to you, mang." Trump has overseen skyrocketing immigration and border crossings from the south, far more than under Obama, so by now they assume he was just bluffing, negging, or empty dog-whistling, or that the party / the rest of the government over-rode his orders.

If you haven't noticed, there are hardly any Hispanics at the psycho libtard marches, protests, riots, etc. They know first-hand that Trump is not "rounding up minorities" or whatever the affluent white liberals are getting hysterical about. They can see directly that their kids are not in cages. Their gangs kept out would-be rioters in Chicago by chasing away any black person who entered their neighborhoods -- hardly a group that's on board with "Black" Lives Matter, let alone white Antifa.

The major open question about them is their turnout. Hispanics show the least civic engagement, including voting in elections. Their lack of participation in the libtard protests is part of that pattern -- even the liberals among them are too apathetic to get psyched up with the white and black long-term base of the Democrat party. They aren't that deeply incorporated into its patronage networks, so why should they invest so much in the party?

This shift among Hispanics pretty much secures Florida for Trump, and puts Nevada and (to a lesser extent) New Mexico in play for the GOP (both have voted GOP several times in the Reagan era). It definitively removes any Sun Belt state from flipping blue (Arizona, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, or whatever else the delusional Dems are imagining). It doesn't have much influence over the Rust Belt, since it's the least Hispanic or immigrant region in the nation. But if those races are close for other reasons, a little increase in Hispanic support could help him eke out another narrow win in one of those states.

As an aside on the Electoral College, a new path has opened up through the Southwest. Namely, the Romney states, the swing states of Ohio and Florida, the Southwestern states of Nevada and New Mexico, and only his widest-margin flip in the Midwest from 2016, Iowa. That's exactly 270, and allows him to lose Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the one district in Maine. It's a close race, so the party is likely not switching tracks to throw the big states that they've already won in the Rust Belt and rely solely on their reach goals in the Southwest. But it's worth pointing out a new path this time, or a way for his 2016 map to expand.

Trump's support from poor people and those without degrees -- "I love the poorly educated," he ad-libbed in 2016 -- is a further consolidation from last time. It's not that the GOP is a working-class party, it's that they're a party of elites and commoners, while the left / Democrats have alienated themselves into a party of managers without subjects.

This is not a steady-state, though, but nearing the end of the pendulum swing in the direction it's headed for decades. It will swing around when the Dems realign by competing for the Deplorable vote with material goodies and an end of cultural shaming. Libtards have delayed realignment at least until 2024, but could go until 2028 if they keep up their puritanical polarization when they're the opposition party of their era.

What do these demographics have in common? They're the least likely to be locked in the elite media bubble, or to be striving their way toward the elite stratum. Whatever pressures would be put on them in order to be accepted among respectable elite circles, do not faze them. They don't care if some yuppie prick from the media thinks they're evil for voting Trump, they'll tell him so anyway.

Conversely, those who are most insecure in their economic and cultural status are most susceptible to appeasing the pollsters, while eventually voting Trump like last time. These are somewhat above-median income earners (not the rich), suburbanites, with some college but not a bachelor's or more, whites, and women.

This is not the AWFL / wine mom demographic, despite being white suburban women who are not poor and who have attended college classes. The key difference is that they are "lower-middle" income and have only "some college" education.

The AWFLs were already bitterly anti-Trump last time, and no more blood could be squeezed from that stone -- only ginning up a higher turnout, not a higher percent opposition to Trump. Hence the pussy hat marches, flipping a handful of House districts, and so on. But that does not scale up to the level of a state, which is why the "blue wave" mid-terms saw Dems losing Senate seats. By catering to the agitated yet tiny pool of pussy hat marchers, to narrowly win back the House, they alienated the rest of the state that these AWFL districts were in.

Naturally that means they won't be a path to flipping a single state in the Electoral College, when they will also get swamped by normie participation in a presidential election year, unlike the fringe mid-terms for obsessives. They may pad the margin for Biden in the pseudo-popular vote, though.

The lower-middle class women with only some college classes, are the ones who the AWFLs were ruthlessly castigating during the pussy hat marches. "How dare white women give Trump the edge he needed!" Four years of relentless cultural pressure on them, and they're now unwilling to openly state their views to their cry-bully frenemies above them on the class pyramid. They know they'll just get yelled at some more, and lose any shot at climbing higher on the respectability ladder.

But that doesn't mean the propaganda campaign has altered their voting behavior. It was AWFLs and other wealthy educated elites who flipped the House in 2018. If the lower-middle / some-college suburban women had succumbed to the pressure once inside the voting booth, the Dems would've flipped dozens more districts, and would've at least held or even gained seats in the Senate.

Women value security more than men, especially if they're not wealthy and elite enough to afford living far from violent areas or hiring private security. So these taqiya Trump voters are really not going to resonate with the BLM / Antifa riots that have burned down the cities that they live right on the edge of. They might not say so openly to pollsters, but like hell they're going to vote for the party responsible for setting off and sustaining the most destructive riots in 50 years.

Some of the huge swing away from Trump in polls of white suburban women is real, if the women do not have families to ground them (not necessarily husbands or children, but their own non-marital family). Then their only source of social pressure is the media stream that they beam into their brain for a simulation of belonging to a solid respectable middle class, rather than struggling lower-middle. But that's not as common as women who are still involved in their family's activities -- especially in the Rust Belt where residents are deeply rooted, and there are few transplants.

At any rate, it's hard to see even the true shift among lower-middles overwhelming the dramatic increase in support from the no-college group.

In all likelihood, the true shift among white suburban women -- the AWFLs getting ginned up in turnout, and a minority of lower-middle ones decreasing their preference for Trump -- just means that the coastal elite states will vote even more strongly for the Democrat, without affecting the election. That's where these psycho strivers and their status-insecure followers are concentrated -- not in flyover country, and not in the unglamorous Rust Belt.

Anyone from flyover country who would be susceptible to such pressure has already moved out to the coastal elite states, making the composition of their home states more stubbornly anti-elite (as any of the bitter Midwestern transplants in coastal mega-cities will endlessly complain about, near family-time holidays).

How many over-produced elites do the over-produced elites think there are in the Rust Belt? Hint: Wisconsin ranks 35 out of 50 in advanced degree-holders per capita, identical to South Carolina and Texas. And Ohio is only a tad higher. So much for all of that "revenge of the nerds" triumphalism -- the poorly educated are about to shove the elite strivers into the smelliest locker they've ever been stuffed into.

If Trump's first victory made them hysterical, his re-election will leave them shell-shocked. Inshallah, we can get back to a normal climate if the libs descend into Trump Catatonia Syndrome. Rather like the late 2000s when Bush Jr. got re-elected, compared to the deranged early 2000s.

RAWR-ing Twenties, here we come. xD

Upside of deep recession: depopulating the swollen professional class

A major factor overlooked by commentators on the rise in inequality, and loss of working-class collective power, is the over-production of the elite class. So far, only Peter Turchin and related academics have discussed these dynamics.

The ranks of the professional class have exploded during the rise of neoliberalism -- signaled by the explosion in college enrollments and the migration into mega-cities, compared to the populist New Deal era when hardly anyone was maximizing their career ambitions, and when they were content to stay close to their humble geographic origins.

Expanding the share of the population that is professional, or professional-aspiring, necessarily shrinks the share of the population that is working-class. And therefore, empowers the professional class, while neutering the working class. Not to mention concentrating more wealth and power in the mega-cities, while robbing it from everywhere else, including urban areas that are just not in the top tier.

A populist or socialist outcome would be for this top-heavy distribution to shed a bunch of slots in the upper layers, reducing the power of professionals to collectively hoard as much as they can, and increasing the collective power of workers to get more of it for themselves -- while remaining in their working-class jobs.

Thus, "college for all" is an anti-socialist goal. It would only worsen these tensions by further depleting the working class of members, turning everyone into strivers. The goal is for working-class people to earn more income, enjoy more benefits, have more humane working conditions, and exercise more control over how their workplace is run. They can only do that by sacrificing individual ambition for the greater good of collective bargaining power. Feeding them all into a college program, in pursuit of professional careers afterward, would make hyper-competitive individualists out of the entire nation.

The upcoming recession is going to be far worse than the 2008 financial crisis, since none of the underlying problems were addressed -- indeed, they were encouraged to fester and grow. The so-called recovery was merely the central bank printing over $4 trillion out of thin air, and handing it out to rich morons to gamble on whatever struck their fancy (quantitative easing).

Those middlemen restricted these trillions of free dollars that the central bank handed them, to the professional class and above. None of it was spent in a way that could create well-paying and humane jobs for the bottom 80% of society. This make-work program for the elites is the Shark Tank economy -- strivers competitively begging for funny-money that the investors had gotten for free ultimately from the central bank.

After the coming financial crisis, though, the central bank will not be able to do the same thing. The success of the last / current project of quantitative easing owed to belief that it would be undone over the course of the recovery. Supposedly, the central bank was not permanently monetizing a shitload of debt that it took on via creating the over $4 trillion that it handed out to the financial elites. That was only supposed to be an emergency measure, and the central bank would contract the money supply that it had so massively inflated.

So, everyone treated the funny-money as though it were real -- if you had a social connection to the central bank, through however-many layers of financial middlemen, congratulations! You could live like kings and queens, despite doing unproductive work.

Only now that the central bank has failed to minimize its debt burden, and has already announced further rounds of quantitative easing -- to zero positive effect in the stock market, contrary to the original rounds -- the jig is up. There is no credibility left to the idea that they can just create another $5 trillion or $10 trillion, hand it out to rich morons, who dole some of it out to the top 20% of society, and somehow that emergency measure will correct and solve itself.

So the professionals won't be living it up like they were during the Obama years. In fact, the crash will be worse than any we've seen because there is no higher financial power left to bail out the institutions that became compromised during the current bubble. Earlier neoliberal bubbles only took out a regional bank, hedge fund, sector (savings & loan), at most the big Wall Street investment banks in 2008.

But now the quantitative easing program has compromised the central bank itself, the one that prints the world's reserve currency no less. So that's it -- whereas the central bank could bail out the Wall Street banks last time, there is no central bank of the solar system that can bail out the de facto world's central bank.

On the bright side, though, all of these depopulated professionals will have no choice but to get real jobs and pursue working-class goals rather than whine for the continuation of a professional-class bubble economy, which is no longer do-able. It will be a boon for populism and socialism -- real socialism, not the SJW-ism of today's professional class.

I discussed this issue earlier, in the context of Bernie tanking his campaign by catering to these professional-class strivers with appeals to Nazi-hunting as the justification for socialist economic programs:

The only glimmer of hope is that the upcoming recession will be a Great Depression-level catastrophe, so painful that it forces the libtards to stop masturbating to their Nazi-hunting fantasies, and train their sights squarely on the real-world threats of laissez-faire, oligarchy per se, and inequality, uniting the great majority of the country in that fight to bring back order after decades of teetering neoliberal chaos.

Their fantasies are luxuries that can only be afforded during comfortable times, and so far the current economic bubble has yet to fully burst. If they were working-class, they would have been mired in hard times for awhile now, but they are all professional-class strivers who have benefited massively from Obama's re-inflation of the info-economy bubble.

Once the global central banks are no longer running the printing presses, the venture capitalists who fund their online media outlet will cut them off, and they will have to move back in with their parents in flyover country, bye-bye Brooklyn. Only when they are materially forced to re-join the human race will they be able to pursue a humanizing political project like socialism.

That proved to be timely, as one of these online media sites -- Splinter -- was just shuttered by its investors, who don't have an endless line of free credit at the central bank anymore. Time for their laid-off staff to move back to wherever they came from, and liberate themselves from the hyper-competitive shithole of Brooklyn.

It will be good for their moral fiber, and hopefully for working-class politics -- they'll have to shut their mouths about alienating culturally liberal bullshit, if they want their minimum-wage job to pay $15 instead of $7. There's no way for them to amass a huge movement to compel employers into raising wages, while shitting all over the majority of the country. Before, there was no cost to them for doing so -- now that they're part of the majority themselves, they have no choice but to conform and shut up about matters that are irrelevant to winning higher wages and better working conditions for themselves.

Final word goes to Aimee "The Vest" Terese, who detonated a bunch of the Splinter staff (and related people elsewhere) for their direct role in hamstringing Bernie's campaign by trying to push him into being an extreme leftoid rather than the culturally moderate populist he won so many people over with last time. These are only two remarks among many ("pmc" means professional-managerial class):

It sucks that a bunch of pmc's in Brooklyn have lost their jobs. Splinter was still a garbage website that ran relentless neolib propaganda.

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) October 10, 2019

This isn't emotional, it's structural. The working class isn't in a position to "extend" solidarity to the professional media gatekeepers whose journalism sets the agenda for the most important election in the world. You fucks collectively act against working class interests. 💋

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) October 11, 2019